Sagunto council honours Club Gimnasia Sagunto for its national medals
Sagunto City Council held a tribute to Club Gimnasia Sagunto for a silver medal at the Spanish Aerobic Gymnastics Championship and a bronze at the Aesthetic Gymnastics Championship, both won this season.
Two national medals won in a single season brought Club Gimnasia Sagunto (Sagunto Gymnastics Club) to Sagunto City Council's plenary hall this week, the setting chosen for an official tribute attended by the Councillor for Physical Activity, Health and Sports, Javier Timón; club president Xavier García; vice-president Ana Belén Franco; coach Sandra Campos; and the medal-winning gymnasts themselves alongside their families.
The first medal, silver, came courtesy of three cadets — Olivia Bossio, Carla Almenar and Júlia Salor — who reached the podium at the Spanish Aerobic Gymnastics Championship held between 11 and 14 June in Cunit, a town in Tarragona province. Their event, choreographic aerobics, requires packing a sequence of high-intensity movements drawn from classic aerobics into just sixty seconds, together with technical difficulty elements that judges score alongside the group's synchronisation and stage presence.
The second medal, bronze, has a collective name: Eva Ribelles, Carlota Peruga, Alana Contreras, Elizabetha Goriuc, Daniella Estada, Diana García and Chloe Báguena make up the youth team — seven girls aged seven to nine, competing together for the first time this season — that took third place at the Spanish Aesthetic Group Gymnastics Championship performing as cheerful Italian gondoliers. Beyond the technical side, their routine also demanded acting skills: on the competition floor, the seven girls had to build a small narrative as gondoliers, blending precision movements with performance and shared stage presence. This discipline, little known outside specialist circles, originated around a century ago in Finland and Sweden (Nordic countries with an early tradition of group gymnastics) under the name women's group gymnastics, and only adopted its current international name, Aesthetic Group Gymnastics (AGG), in 1996.
Speaking for the council, Timón stressed the sporting demands behind both results and argued that tributes like this help pull under-covered disciplines out of obscurity, turning their young athletes into role models for other girls in the municipality. On behalf of the club, García thanked the council for its institutional backing of grassroots work and praised the sustained effort of families and the board in keeping the club running all year. García also highlighted the role of gymnastics in the all-round development of young athletes, both competitively and in values such as effort, discipline and teamwork.
Coach Campos, for her part, pointed out that this was the first official recognition received by the youth team, and admitted that expectations for these seven girls in coming seasons are very high. Campos also highlighted the role of the club's youth sports schools as an essential feeder system, and stressed the family spirit that, in her words, defines the club and rests as much on the gymnasts themselves as on the constant support of their relatives. She also used the occasion to highlight two disciplines — group aesthetic gymnastics and aerobic gymnastics — that, in her words, get barely any media attention despite their physical and technical demands.
Behind these results lie years of grassroots work: the club combines aerobic and aesthetic group gymnastics with a strong focus on personal development, where discipline and teamwork carry as much weight as competitive technique. The event also fits into an established municipal effort to give visibility to grassroots women's sport, similar to the recognition Sagunto hands out each year at its Sports Gala to athletes in less mainstream disciplines, as previously happened with weightlifter Alicia Munuera and other specific awards aimed at making sportswomen in youth categories more visible. In that context, a modest club like Gimnasia Sagunto is carving out its own space alongside better-known local sports entities, relying above all on the quiet work of families and volunteers.
A silver and a bronze won in two different disciplines within a single season represent, for the club, its best recent results at national level, a boost both the club and the council hope will help attract more children to these sports in coming years. According to Sagunto City Council and elperiodic.com, with additional background from Wikipedia on aerobic gymnastics and aesthetic group gymnastics.