The fittest man in the world is Kohei Uchimura, of Japan. He showed this last night, at the men’s all-around final of the World Championships at the O2 arena in southeast London, with a performance of calm and spectacular brilliance. And glory be, the next fittest is a Brit: Daniel Keatings, with great courage and a visible conquest of his nerves, finished second.

A good few years ago, a pan-galactic survey across the limitless spaces of sport came to an altogether unexpected conclusion: that the fittest of all athletes were male gymnasts. Unexpected, that is, to anybody who had not watched them at it. I cannot believe that the position has changed.

True, standards of fitness have changed out of all recognition in all sports. Cricketers cross-train, sometimes calamitously, rugby players look for agility as well as strength, some golfers actually do gym work. I even met a darts player who incorporated serious swimming sessions into his training.

But no one can match the physical achievement of the top-level gymnast, not when every aspect of fitness is brought into the equation. Strength? You try the cross on the rings, when you hold yourself with arms parallel to the floor, as if in crucifixion. Speed? You don’t hang about on the runway when you have a couple of somersaults or 2½ twists to complete between the vaulting horse and the ground beyond it.

They have their edge in the flexibility, which no one in any sport can match. And then there is the endurance to cope with six pieces of apparatus in a long session to find out whether you are, indeed, the finest gymnast in the world or just one of the beautifully honed losers, men who must accept their inferiority to the champion, while knowing that they are in some senses superior to every other athlete competing in any sport anywhere in the world.

All that, and courage as great as any you can find in sport. And, of course, beauty, if you care for such a thing. Beauty of a hard and austere kind, but consciously sought. In this sport, the beauty is not incident, but the fruit of hard and bitter hours.

The gymnast who wins the all-around must be able to do everything, and do it beautifully. There are six drastically different disciplines and it’s no good carrying a couple and hoping to get by on your strong points. You must be up for the ballet and tumbling of the floor, the Swiss-watch precision of the pommel horse, the tear-inducing strength work on the rings, the dash and daring of the vault, the constricted and awkward elegance of the parallel bars, and on the high bar, nothing less than the courage and the skill to fly.

It is an utterly unforgiving sport. Failure can be curiously total. Gymnastics is about the creating and holding of extreme and perfect positions, but when things go wrong, the transition from God to fool is instantaneous. Feel, then, for Jonathan Horton, of the United States, who stepped on to the mat as a contender, the first to perform on the night, and ended up on his bum when he landed a double back-somersault a fraction out of true.

These days, even the Brits are beginning to cut it at the highest level. Not exactly a powerhouse nation as yet, but the attitude in the sport has changed from a shoulder-shrugging admission that the Russians were light years out of reach to a culture of ambition and improvement.

An edgy routine on the floor led Keatings to step off the the mat twice in his first discipline, but he came back with a driving routine on the pommel and kept going. He soon found himself in second position; dizzying times, indeed. Scorning vertigo, he held on to the position with glorious tenacity. Kristian Thomas managed sixth to make it a grand night for the Britons.

You start by being bowled over by the brilliance of everybody taking part, but soon you find your eye attracted by a gymnast who has something beyond mere brilliance. Right from his first tumble-run in the floor exercise, Uchimura showed that. It is the transition from air to ground that finds out a gymnast: Uchimura touched down from a high-speed high-level sequence like a man stepping off an escalator.

This is a sport that now looks beyond perfection. The more difficulty you pack into your routine, the more points you get. Uchimura crammed three double somersaults into his parallel bars; gloriously excessive, just one part of a performance of confidence and increasing authority.

With the traditional Japanese thistle-down haircut and a great air of bounce and enjoyment, he always looked the man who had the edge.

He led into his final routine, on the high bar, and anyone normal would have played it safe. Uchimura gave us a routine of dazzling brilliance, one that included three different forms of the kovacs, the somersaulting release-and-catch, the most spectacular move in the sport.

He won like a champion; a glorious thing in any sport, but particularly so in this.

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