IN SPORT, truth is action, action is truth. Don’t ask an athlete: “How does it feel?” Ask a poet. That’s what poets are good at. An athlete doesn’t tell. An athlete shows. An athlete produces poetry all right, but it is all in the moving. Most athletes prefer to leave the verbal gymnastics to Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Thoughts that brought me to a gym in Toxteth. I had been there before; at least to gyms just like it. In particular, I remembered a gym on one of the more nightmarish bits of New York’s Eighth Avenue. A blizzard in progress, yet a crowd still gathered to see the toiler in the well-lit window, socking the heavy bag, whacking hell out of the speed-ball, dancing, sweating, panting. Sugar Ray Leonard was preparing for his final bout.

In Toxteth, Beth Tweddle, 19, was preparing for her next. The commitment to work, to pain, to an ever-nearing goal; these were precisely the same, indistinguishable. True, one was seeking to create bloodshed and mayhem, the other beauty, but that is a mere detail. A difference that makes no difference is no difference.

I arrived in the middle of a series of exercises for strengthening the stomach muscles. Tweddle’s top five eighths was hanging face down over the edge of a pit, like a character in Edgar Allan Poe, while Amanda Kirby, her coach, sat on her legs. From head down, a series of reverse sit-ups — from 90 degrees to the horizontal, again and again. Just part of a gentle warm-up.

Tweddle is the first British woman in the modern era of gymnastics to go to the Olympic Games with a chance of winning a medal. In her top discipline, the asymmetric bars, she won a silver medal at the European Championships in May, the best result by a Britain gymnast at an international competition outside the Commonwealth Games. It was the performance of a lifetime.

Now she seeks another and a better one. She knows that, in the heartland Olympic sports, all other competitions are but wayside stations. But it is a fact that after years of admiring and making up the numbers, Britain has at last produced a gymnast capable of standing — capable of leaping, spinning and dancing — with the best.

The long warm-up was like a nightmare ballet class; similar demands, except that an awful lot of it is upside down. “And one and two and three and four!” Kirby commented on Tweddle’s position with a pat on the thigh, a gentle slap that was as much encouragement as correction, a touch that had a great hinterland of affection, of hours and years working for a shared goal.

A long morning of work, recovery, work, recovery. Tweddle would get to her feet, create a bit of beauty and then turn beauty off like a tap, flopping down like a newly calved wildebeest. Resting, sprawled on the floor, gassing to a colleague. Then getting up to be beautiful again.

I was reminded of a story about Marilyn Monroe, walking with one of her husbands — say it was Arthur Miller — through New York. All of a sudden people started to gawp and follow. “Sorry. I guess I started being Marilyn,” she said.

Tweddle did her work in a small trance of concentration, eyes making no communication with the world. On the beam now, going through the more balletic elements of her routine. Just to see her walking backwards (without looking, naturally) is to get a small idea of what it takes to be great at this sport.

A back somersault on the beam is something we can’t even think about. But anyone can walk backwards, although perhaps not along a beam. And perhaps not being beautiful while doing so. In these small and comprehensible things, we can often reach a sudden understanding of what the great and incomprehensible things are all about.

Six hours a day. But that’s easy. Tweddle has always done six hours a day — that’s what she does, that’s what she is. And she’s in her gap year, a full-time gymnast. “Boring,” she said, as a teenager should.

Not the gymnastics, the parts in between. She is used to six hours of gymnastics somehow spatchcocked on to a normal school day. For Tweddle, only idleness is boring.