![]() I made the bars final in Melbourne but I was very young then. “I want to bring back a bars medal because it’s my favourite event. This week at the Commonwealth Games, Downie will once again try out the routines she is hoping to nail in Rio in two years’ time, with her first competitive action taking place on Monday. Next year she will be a senior, but luckily we won’t be in competition with each other because her specialist event is the all-around and the vault, whereas I’m more a bars and beam worker.” We’re all focused on Rio and so it makes sense to all be on the same page. This is the first year we’ve prepared for the same event. “We both have similar goals of Rio together which is really nice to have someone to share that with. The two live together at the family home and are very close. It was a very special week.”Įllie began doing gymnastics aged three, after tagging along to the gym with her older sister. It was like, we’d been on the same training programme, with the same coach, so there was no reason why it wouldn’t pay off for me too. “I watched Ellie win gold before I went to do my bars final,” she says. Ellie went on to win a second title on the vault on the same day that Becky won her European title. It definitely gives me confidence to know I’ve done it once so hopefully I can do it again.”Īnother factor in her recent success may be down to the presence of her younger sister, the junior Great Britain gymnast Ellie Downie, who also made history this year in becoming the first British woman to secure a European all-around title. “It was a huge relief at the Europeans, all the hard work had finally paid off after so many years. Not only did she become the second British woman to win the European title, after Tweddle, but she beat the Olympic champion and one of the most decorated gymnasts around in Aliya Mustafina. Downie was outstanding at the Europeans in Sofia. A year on, however, and the new routine has reaped its rewards. So we looked at the best ways to move forward and that’s when we decided to completely reconstruct my routine.”Ī new routine in 2013 meant another bumpy year as Downie twice qualified for European and world finals, and then faltered when it really mattered. “I still felt there was more that I could do,” she says now, “that I still hadn’t achieved what I’d really wanted to. In a sport that is incredibly tough to succeed in, that typically writes off female gymnasts in their 20s, and that demands huge sacrifice for very little financial remuneration, it says something quite awe-inspiring about Downie’s character that the 22-year-old chose to stick with it. ![]() ![]() I had the decision, then, whether to carry on or to call it a day.” Obviously as a reserve, I still had to keep training as hard as I could right up until the last minute and I think that was one of the hardest things to carry on training knowing that there was a chance I wouldn’t compete. “In my career I’d never not made a team unless I’d been injured so it was very difficult for me to accept that I hadn’t been picked as part of the squad. To have my major injury in 2011, when I ruptured my achilles, that obviously affected my preparation for London 2012 and I was then selected as a reserve which was really difficult for me. ![]()
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