The untold story of ‘Paige Spiranac, the gymnast who was going to the Olympics’

Paige Spiranac is a well-known personality in the world of golf. She had a career as a player but her renown comes mostly from having become an influencer with more than 11 million followers across all social networks. Most of her content revolves around golf.

What few fans know, however, is that Spiranac had never even touched a golf club until her early teens. Other sporting interests were at the forefront of Paige's and her entire family's thoughts in those days.

“Gymnastics was my full identity. Everyone knew me as ‘Paige the gymnast who was going to the Olympics.’”

That's how Paige Spiranac described it for Golf Digest. And that conviction to reach the top, i.e. the Olympic Games, was so strong that the girl began to be home-schooled to facilitate her training sessions. Eight hours a day, six days a week!

Her entire family even moved to Colorado Springs, where the youngest Spiranac pursued her gymnastics career.

However, fortune was against her. Both her body and the year she was born conspired to hinder her dream of becoming an Olympic gymnast.

She explained to The Sun:

"I was competing at a really high level. I wanted to go to the Olympics, but with gymnastics, there's an age restriction. So you have to be 16 or turning 16 in the year of the Olympics and the first year I would have been eligible (2012), I was 18, which is past your prime.

"Also ... I just didn't have the right body build. I'm a bit taller, but you have to be short and strong and ... that's not my body type."

However, the worst was yet to come.

Paige Spiranac's injury

As if she didn't have enough going against her for a future as a gymnast, little Paige Spiranac fractured her kneecap not once, but twice. This shattered any chance of success for her in the field of gymnastics. She was 11-12 years old at the time.

Paige Spiranac, 11, showing her cast after fraturing her knee cap for the first time. (Image via Golf Digest).

This is how Spiranac herself described it to The Enquirer:

"I was doing a vault, so I was jumping backward [and] when I was taking off, the muscle pulled the bone off my kneecap.

"In gymnastics, it's all about never show[ing] when you're injured, so I went almost a month with a broken kneecap.”

She added:

"I was scared to tell my coaches, and I was scared to tell my parents [laughs]. I finally told my mom. The doctor said that this injury was like one in a million. And then it happened again six months later. So I had to quit.”

Overcoming something like this for a 12-year-old girl is obviously not easy. However, from a distance, Paige Spiranac seems to have done it with admirable maturity. As she told The Sun, she had a fleeting stint in tennis, but didn't consolidate there because it reminded her too much of gymnastics:

"I wish I stuck at it as I think I could have been a better tennis player than a golf player. But it was a little bit too familiar to gymnastics and I felt like I needed a change."

Paige Spiranac took her first golf swing at the age of 13 and her life was forever changed. In her own words, she "loved it from the first moment." Contrary to what, perhaps, many think, she had a more than decent career as an amateur.

Paige Spiranac at the 2019 Omega Dubai Moonlight Classic (Image via Getty).

So much so that, as a junior, she reached the Top 20 in the world, which opened the door to a college scholarship to play golf for the University of Arizona in the NCAA circuit.

After an excellent stint as a collegiate golfer for three seasons, Paige Spiranac played some amateur tournaments. At this level, she had some impressive results. This included her victory over the then No. 1 amateur in the world, Hannah O’Sullivan, in a sudden-death tournament held at Scottsdale's Orange Tree Country Club in 2016.

However, that same year, she failed to qualify for her first LPGA Tour tournament. Spiranac then decided not to pursue a career in professional golf, in order to focus entirely on her future as an influencer. The result we all know today.