This tough and tiny dynamo is the breakout ‘American Ninja Warrior’ star

AMERICA has fallen in love with Barclay Stockett who recently became the shortest athlete in the show’s history to scale the Warped Wall.

WHEN Barclay Stockett cleared the 4.41m curved beast known as the Warped Wall, she became one of the rising stars of American Ninja Warrior — and a hero to the vertically challenged.

The wall is difficult even for the lean, lanky — and usually male — competitors, who can reach for its ledge more easily. But at just 5ft tall and 50kg, the 23-year-old Texan is all biceps and smiles, and the shortest athlete in the show’s history to scale the wall.

“My body just took over,” Stockett tells The Post of the moment last month when she triumphed in the American version of the competitive obstacle show, now in its ninth season.

To reach her goal, the former gymnast trained at least 12 hours a week, transforming into a human rubber band to clear the wall on her first try and bound through the remaining obstacles. She competed in the NBC show’s finals, which will air on September 4.

The show breeds breakout stars such as Stockett, as fans root for athletes who can effortlessly manoeuvre through obstacles that test their strength, flexibility and physical limitations.

Clips of American Ninja Warrior women’s victories tend to go viral. The Wonder Woman-costume-wearing finalist Jessie Graff’s conquering of the Wedge, an obstacle in which competitors hang from a bar while driving it across a wedge-shaped gap, has more than nine million YouTube views.

Stockett, one of six homeschooled siblings, jokes that she “basically came out of the womb with muscles.” At 7, she climbed up a 6m lamppost and swung from it, but it wasn’t until the relatively ancient age of 12 that she started taking gymnastics. Five years later, she was competing nationally.

She was in uni when she caught a clip of Ninja Warrior success story Kacy Catanzaro, the first woman to qualify for the final round of the show. Catanzaro, who also mounted the Warped Wall, wowed audiences by making it up a movable pull-up bar known as the Salmon Ladder. That clip from 2014 has been viewed more than 15 million times on YouTube.

“None of the other sports I tried felt like the perfect fit for me until I saw Kacy get up the wall,” she says.

She sought out a Ninja-training gym an hour away in Houston, where she now lives and works demonstrating obstacles to the military with the company Alpha Warrior, developing obstacle exercises for the troops. On her first day there, she says, she cleared many of the iconic obstacles, including the gym’s 4.2m Warped Wall — although it took her about 40 tries to do so.

She went on to win at local and national Ninja Warrior competitions, then competed on the show’s eighth season. That time, she didn’t make the finals: She fell on a “log running” obstacle, a series of rolling tubes that is particularly difficult to cross with short legs.

Determined to make it the next time, she hired a football coach to help transform her lower body into a powerhouse machine. Training included scampering between rungs on a speed ladder to become more swift of foot, jumping atop boxes more than half her height and balancing on medicine balls to increase stability and balance. She also took up rock climbing for the many obstacles that have her dangling in the air.

Barclay Stockett during American Ninja Warrior’s San Antonio Finals. Picture: Felicia Graham/NBC

Her new-found agility and strength allowed her to bound through the show’s many challenges, like a set of “sky hooks,” rings suspended in the air, which Stockett successfully conquered in San Antonio last month. But she says she doesn’t rely on muscle alone to get her through. She’s developed a few pre-run rituals — a blueberry bagel with peanut butter the morning of a competition — and super-moisturised lips.

“I probably reapply ChapStick 20 times before [the run] starts,” she says with a laugh.

Now, after several appearances on qualifiers and semi-finals, Stockett’s approaching celebrity status.

“I was in Target, and a 10-year-old kid came up and said, ‘You’re the short girl who made it up the wall. Can I take a photo with you?’” she recalls.

She hopes to join the ranks of women who become role models not for having model-perfect bodies but for their strength.

“I never really had a female athlete to look up to as a kid,” she says. “So I’m hoping I can be that for girls and boys — and short people, too.”

The first season of Australian Ninja Warrior was a ratings smash for Channel Nine. Viewers were disappointed that no one made it past stage two in the grand final but America’s first ever Ninja Warrior winner, Isaac Caldiero, recently warned we shouldn’t expect a winner anytime soon.

This article was originally published on the New York Post

Originally published as This tough and tiny dynamo is the breakout ‘American Ninja Warrior’ star