You can’t please some people — forever moaning that “real sports stars” are not acknowledged on the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year and then continuing to moan when the top three come from outside the “holy trinity” of football, rugby and golf.
Beth Tweddle’s gold medal on the uneven bars at the World Gymnastics Championships this year has inspired a generation of children in Britain who were previously under the impression that unless you are Chinese or from a former state of the Soviet Union, you don’t stand a chance on the world stage.
The gold medal was a good start, as was the one she collected at the World Cup in Brazil on Saturday night, but coming in the top three on Sports Personality of the Year could give gymnastics the kind of PR that money can’t buy.
What is not to love about gymnastics? It combines just about every attribute you could hope for in a sportsman or woman: grace, bravery, confidence, dexterity and power, to name a few. Most young girls and lots of young boys do gymnastics of some sort, even if it is only for one term at school, so the chances are you will be familiar with a horse, a beam or at the least a mat, although because of scarce television coverage we are not on first-name terms with the national squad.
I wanted to be a tennis player, but when we moved to Leeds in 1983 the city did not boast good facilities, so I followed my sister along to rhythmic gymnastics (a different discipline from what Beth does). I had done gymnastics on and off over the years, but at 10 it was time to knuckle down or quit. So I knuckled down.
My coach happened to be one of the national squad coaches, so progress was rapid. To cut a long story short, I represented Great Britain for four years and retired with a back problem after the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland, where I had represented Wales.
For about seven years I lived and breathed gymnastics. Before I “retired”, I was getting up at 5.30am to put an hour in at the gym before school and then training three hours after school, plus weekends. Most summer and Easter holidays were spent at Lilleshall or some other centre of excellence, training eight hours a day.
If I seemed obsessed, that is because I was. Gymnastics gets you that way — it’s all or nothing. The sport is about precise movements, so execution is everything and the only way to perfect your moves is to repeat them again and again and again. Many times in my adult life I have tapped back into that experience. Preparation is everything and, as Gary Player, the golfer, commented, the harder I trained, the luckier I got.
When I finished competing, I found life a bit of a disappointment. Nothing could give me the thrill that performing did. I missed the training, the nerves before competition and the discipline gymnastics gave me. For a short while I regretted that gymnastics had been my sport. Why was I on the scrapheap at 17? Why couldn’t I have picked a sport that would have given me longevity? Golf or athletics, perhaps.
Now I look back and thank God I had the chance to take part in a sport that helped to shape me as a person and gave me some good tools for life. Incidentally, giving birth is the only experience I have had since that has eclipsed the buzz of competing.
Because gymnastics training is so intensive, you need to become an excellent time manager. How else do you fit in three hours’ training an evening and three hours of homework? My parents were happy to take me to training but were not the type to sit and watch, or even watch me compete, so motivation had to come from within.
At 14 I would leave Leeds train station at 7am on a Saturday to get to Bedford for 10am, train for six hours, and then travel home. Trains were a good place to do homework and to think. I got to know my body incredibly well and, while there are pressures to keep a low body-weight and a certain physique, I understood what my body was capable of and respected it.
Of course, such behaviour meant that there was no time to get into the kind of trouble some teenagers do. Instead, as a working-class Northern lass, I was subjected to a world of classical music that I would never have known, spending hours going through tapes to find the perfect 1min 25sec for my routines.
Looking back, “turn that Prokofiev down” is not the normal shout to a 14-year-old’s bedroom door and drinking Lucozade on New Year’s Eve at 16 does seem rather “square”. But my “normal” teenage friends, who did drink Baileys and Pernod round the back of the Irish Centre, loved what I did and threw me a surprise going-away party before I flew to Auckland, complete with lemonade, hummus and wholemeal pitta bread.
Like any sport, gymnastics was about sacrifices, but I was competing in the full understanding I would never make a penny from it. There was no professional career at the end of the line. This was something of a problem for my dad, a professional footballer and manager. He admitted to my sister and me that he did not take our gymnastics as seriously as my brother’s football. It was not paying for training that bugged him, it was the lack of a career at the end. He had left home at 15 and moved to different countries for the love of his sport, but also for a wage. With hindsight, I think he would admit that maybe he was a bit short-sighted and I know he was incredibly proud when I was chosen to represent Wales.
My sister has used her sport in a more obvious way. She is an acrobat/dancer with Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas and at 32 she is still performing a daredevil act twice a night and wants to carry on for as long as her body will let her.
I had dinner with two of my best friends who were also in the national squad in the 1980s and 1990s. One is a classically trained pianist and rock band member who speaks Russian thanks to a coach from Ukraine, and the other is an actress living in Los Angeles with a recording contract and three children.
I have no regrets about the sport that chose us; the travel, training and tantrums were definitely not in vain.
