The Olympics........1972!

You know how once in a while you are reminded unexpectedly of something so acutely you can recall every last detail, the sights, the sounds, the emotions, even the smells, well yesterday, as I perused the BBC's coverage of the Olympics this year I was suddenly transported by a short clip of video back to my childhood. This clip, as it transpired, was to literally change my life. (Below is a version of same but the linked BBC version is much better.)


It was 1972 and TV wasn't encouraged in our family (despite it being my father's lifetime profession) but the Olympics were apparently different and relatively unlimited viewing time was allowed.

By chance I was sat in front of the dreaded 'box' when Olga Korbut did her winning floor routine for the gymnastic finals and unusually for me (Ms.limited concentration span here) I was absolutely transfixed.

Almost immediately my mother found herself with the task of finding one small daughter a gymnastic club that would allow her to 'try out'. As mothers do she found one post-haste and I was given my chance to 'impress' them a few weeks later. Oh, the confidence of youth, bear in mind here I had not had so much as a moments coaching thus far and other than watching Korbut I knew nothing whatsoever about the sport.

However, my confidence was rewarded. As the club put me through my paces for a day and instructed me on each move it began to be apparent that I might just have found my niche, whatever they asked me to do I could, it seemed and I won my place already able to perform much that the long standing members could.

I can still now remember the feeling, the realisation that 'Ms Average 11 year old kid' had found something she excelled in naturally, the attention I got from coaches and onlookers that day felt tantamount to adulation at my tender years and I felt like I was famous in my little world!

And that was the start of it, the next however many years were to be spent in a gym every waking moment I wasn't being schooled, weekends and evenings were spent competing at various levels and I often made it home with a winning result to my name. Remember that we are talking the 1970's, gymnastics, like all sports, was in comparison to current standards in it's infancy, but to the those not familiar with the finer points, I would have appeared at least, to have mastered much that my inspiration Korbut was competing with by the time I had been coached for maybe only a year.

Unfortunately to those with a practiced eye, namely the judges, I had a way to go and my dreams of getting into the British squad were just that, dreams, and realitically it wasn't going to happen. Yes, for the era, I was good if I say so myself, but I wasn't that good and as the years progressed and I repeatedly started to place second or third or even lower in the competition arena, the obsessively competitive kid in me began to lose interest. Spending all my time in a gymnasium with a coach barking orders at me and with most parts of my body bruised, bumped, twisted or injured in one way or another began to seem something less than the fun my contemporaries were by then engaged in....namely the usual teenage interests of partying, discos, boys and booze.

I was sweating it out and they were out partying, they wore fashionable clothes and I couldn't even get my way too big and un-feminine calf and thigh muscles into the narrow jeans of the day, they were developing a girly shape while I was looking more akin to a short version of Charles Atlas and they were building stamina for late nights while I was building stamina for day after day bandaging torn muscles and ligaments!

You can see why the interest began to wane!

Winning awards and medals might have had it's pull once but the little perfectionist already in me felt it was pointless if I wasn't going to make the grade. This coincided with my losing my coach (long and not very nice story) and being unable to find another as good..... and so almost as fast as I had started the whole malarkey years earlier, I stopped it and walked out of a gym for the last time at around age sixteen. I spent a few years fending off those trying to persuade me to become a coach but somehow it wasn't the same, my time in a gymnasium was well and truly over.

But it did change my life, it filled much of those odd early teenage years, it gave me direction, it taught me stamina and it gave me confidence, at least some of the time and it's the reason my asthmatic lungs have thus far had the capacity to let me breath normally despite my smoking!

Annoyingly in the longer term it's the reason I have the painful joints now of someone much older, being uber bendy and pummelling ones body to within an inch of it's life for years eventually takes it toll and though I don't understand the physiology I will never give Dolly Parton or Jordan a run for their money, the only part of a gymnast's chest that becomes 'well developed' is the pecs! ;o)

Strange what one little video clip can bring back!