“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.

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