When Commonwealth Games track athlete Portia Bing made a visit to her alma mater, Baradene College, one young girl was spellbound.
Aspiring gymnast Havana Hopman, then about 13, was hooked on every word Bing uttered.
“She had such a big influence on me,” Hopman says. “I remember asking her heaps of questions. One of them was ‘How many badges did you have on your school blazer?’
“That was my goal to have all the badges by Year 13.” A year out of high school, Hopman’s own heavily embellished Baradene blazer remains a prized possession.
Seven years after that first meeting, both women are national champions in their respective sporting fields, and find themselves together in the New Zealand team for the Birmingham Commonwealth Games. One in the 400m hurdles; the other in rhythmic gymnastics.
Now 18, Hopman has been carving her own path in international sport. Earlier this year she competed at three gymnastics World Cups in eastern Europe to earn her ticket to Birmingham. And she did it while she battled a chest infection, ending up hospitalised in Bulgaria.
She’s thrilled to be in the same team as her role model – who literally set the bar high for her.
Throughout her years at Baradene, in Auckland, Hopman broke all of Bing’s school high jump records.
Even though she was focused on rhythmic gymnastics and making the 2022 Commonwealth Games team, high jump was “something I liked to do on the side”, explains Hopman, who jumped at national secondary schools level.
“My dad and I would sit down and say: ‘Okay we’ve got to break this school record’. I got it in Year 7 and 8, then my goal was to get it every year,” she says.
In her final year of high school, she cleared 1.66m to snare Bing’s senior record.
She had some competition – including Bing’s younger sister, Lillian, a national junior pole vault champion (who won bronze at the Oceania champs in Mackay last weekend). “I’d say to Lilli ‘I’m so sorry but I really want to get your sister’s record’,” Hopman says.
Lillian and Havana bump into each other on the school grounds, and wish each other luck in their international competitions. One day, they say and laugh, they could be on the same New Zealand team, too.
With the bar now well behind her, Hopman is concentrating on the hoop, ball, clubs, ribbon and rope – and winning a medal in Birmingham.
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When Hopman was in Year 10 at Baradene, she approached the school’s director of sport, Catherine Ratcliffe, and asked if she could coach the school’s rhythmic gymnasts.
“She came to us, she wanted to do it,” Ratcliffe says. “It’s not often athletes can give back.” Especially when they’re still at school.
To acknowledge her contribution, Hopman received the student service to sport award last year for her dedication to coaching. She’s happy to help out again – but once her long international season is over.
I meet Hopman in the principal’s office of the Catholic girls’ school in Remuera, her first time back at Baradene since she left. “It’s weird signing in as a visitor,” she says.
Hopman was competing for New Zealand even before she started at the school in Year 7. She began tumbling and cartwheeling at kids’ gym classes from the time she could walk.
“I used to climb the door frames in my house, wait for someone to go past and jump down on them,” she laughs.
A swimming coach told her parents Hopman’s very flexible feet would make her good at ballet and gymnastics.
At seven, her ballet teacher told her she should do rhythmic gymnastics.
“I was looking for another sport, so she got me to watch a YouTube video of her daughter doing rhythmic gymnastics. I remember thinking ‘wow’ – she was throwing the hoop up, rolling under it and catching it behind her back,” Hopman says. “So I went and tried it, and my parents couldn’t get me out of the gym.”
She’s grateful for a decade of ballet classes. “It’s a huge part of gymnastics to have good technique,” she says.
Neither of her parents, Donna and Nick, were gymnasts, but they encouraged their kids to do sport. Hopman’s older brother, Cooper, is a sailor.
They even gave up the lounge in their Glendowie home during Covid lockdowns for their daughter’s makeshift gym floor.
Her dad, she says, is her biggest supporter, and it’s her wish he’ll be well enough to travel to Birmingham.
“My parents and aunty have booked their tickets. But Dad had lung cancer and had part of a lung removed. Now he has it in a lymph node, so he’s having chemo now,” she says.
“Hopefully he’ll be healthy enough to be there. If not, the world championships [in Bulgaria] are the following month, and he could come to that.” Hopman has her fingers crossed he’ll be there to witness both pinnacle events in her career.
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Hopman can’t imagine where her sporting pathway would have led her had she not gone to Baradene.
“You always supported me with all my international tours,” she says to principal Sandy Pasley. “You were always asking ‘How can we help you?’”
Pasley says it went both ways. “Havana is a very modest young woman. From our point of view, she was a fantastic role model to other students. She was a great student leader, who quietly got on with everything, and she was an absolutely outstanding athlete.
“Our 1350 students and 100 staff will be with you entirely at the Games, Havana. We’re just so excited to see you perform.”
Hopman and Bing won’t be the only Baradene old girls in Birmingham. Young spinner Fran Jonas (who was in the same year as Hopman) is in the White Ferns side to play T20 – the first time women’s cricket has been part of the Commonwealth Games.
And Year 12 student Lanihei Connolly will be swimming for the Cook Islands; she’s still 16.
“It’s so good to see these girls who’ve balanced their school life with chasing their sporting dreams. They’ve shown tremendous commitment,” says Pasley.
She then quotes English nun and educator Janet Erskine Stuart: ‘Our education is not meant to turn our students out small and finished, but seriously begun on a wide basis.’
“I really hope Havana has seriously begun,” Pasley says.
Baradene approaches sport with a two-pronged philosophy: encouraging excellence and promoting participation.
“Participation is huge for us,” says Catherine Ratcliffe. “It’s a really important part of school life.”
While research shows there’s a significant decline in Kiwi teenage girls staying in sport or recreational activity, Ratcliffe is proud of Baradene’s participation numbers: 78 percent of Year 9 to 13 students are involved in school sport; at Year 7 and 8, it’s over 90 percent.
“Our students can choose from 28 sports, and in every sport bar one [skiing] if they want to play a sport, they can do it,” she says.
“A big sport at Baradene is archery. It’s important to have a variety of sports, because they each appeal to different people.”
In terms of high performance, 14 of the school’s top athletes are taking part in the BEST (Baradene Elite Specialised Training) programme.
“It’s a holistic programme, not an academy, aimed at supporting these young athletes. They can use the AUT Millennium for training if they need it, and we also provide nutrition and mental skills training, or support with their workload,” Ratcliffe says.
Hopman laughs: “You had to keep up your schoolwork or get kicked out of the programme. I really enjoyed the one-on-one mentoring. It’s nice to talk to someone about your problems, and get it all out of your system.”
Fortunately, she managed to keep up her schoolwork; she’s now in her first year studying health sciences at the University of Auckland.
“I’ve always thought of becoming a sports doctor. I find science really interesting,” Hopman says. She’s taken on just two papers this semester so she can train at her Counties Manukau club in Takanini in the afternoons.
“I’m trying to do my sport while my body still works, and make the most of it,” she says. “Because when I’m 30, I probably won’t be as mobile as I am now.”
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Hopman can’t believe it came down to her last attempt.
With one of her two coaches, Tracey Redhead, in tow (and the other, Elena Pirozhenko, chiming in on Zoom calls) Hopman went to Europe in March to compete in four international competitions, including three World Cups.
It was the moment Hopman had waited for since Covid hit New Zealand two years before. “I’d dreamed about it since the first lockdown in 2020 – to finally go overseas and really start my international career,” she says.
But it didn’t start well. In her first major event, the Sofia Cup in Bulgaria, she fell ill on competition day.
“I got a viral chest infection, and it was probably the sickest I’ve ever been,” she says. “I did the competition but I didn’t realise how sick I was. I was falling down in routines.”
But she wouldn’t let a virus steal her moment on the world stage, again. The whole reason she was in Europe was to prove she could finish in the top six in the Commonwealth.
Although she’d impressed with her clubs and ribbon routines at Sofia and Taskent, Uzbekistan, it came down to the last World Cup, in Baku, Azerbaijan, to meet the standards she needed to be nominated by Gymnastics NZ to the NZ Olympic Committee.
“It was incredibly stressful, I was a bit emotionally drained,” Hopman says. “On the last day I knew it was my last chance, and somehow we did it.
“It was the hardest experience I’d ever had competing. But there’s something about the world stage. The stadiums are massive, and people who don’t even know you will call out ‘catch’ in Russian or Bulgarian. They’re all clapping, and little girls look up to you. The emotions you get are insane.”
Hopman is well again, and can’t wait to make her Commonwealth Games debut, alongside her team-mate, Paris Chin, who’s in her final year at Christchurch’s Burnside High School.
And speaking of Paris, Hopman is already thinking ahead to the 2024 Olympics. Angela Walker was the last Kiwi rhythmic gymnast to compete at an Olympics, in Seoul in 1988. Hopman wants to break the drought.
“The process starts now – this year’s world championships are one of the first qualifiers,” she says. “It’s definitely a dream of every athlete. There’s no question, I absolutely want to be there. I’ll just keep working.”
