Gymnastics gets Fashionable

“Mummy, why is that man wear­ing pink shoes?” A small girl points as Louis Smith per­forms an immac­u­late hand­stand on the par­al­lel bars, dressed in a Dries van Noten top and gar­ish two-tone brogues.

At the Hunt­ing­don gym, in Cam­bridgeshire, a man wear­ing pink shoes is some­thing to com­ment on; a man per­form­ing eye-popping tricks on the P-bars is not. This gym is the hub of Britain’s incred­i­ble gym­nas­tics story, where head coach Paul Hall trained two teenage boys who reached Olympic finals in Bei­jing. One of them, 19-year-old Smith, came away with a bronze medal on the pom­mel horse – Britain’s first indi­vid­ual Olympic gym­nas­tics medal in 100 years.

Full story here.