Olympics Special interview: The two squabbling sisters who are revolutionising British gymnastics

Becky and Ellie Downie, the gymnast sisters at the heart of Team GB
Becky and Ellie Downie, the gymnast sisters at the heart of Team GB Credit: Daniel Stier 

Laughter rings out around the Notts Gymnastics Academy as Becky and Ellie Downie, the sisters at the heart of  the British team, discuss their symbiotic, sometimes suffocating relationship.

Both still based at their family home in Hucknall, they drive 45 minutes to the gym each day, then train for five to six hours before returning home to their proudest possession:  a Game Ready cold-compression machine for soothing aching muscles. Such constant proximity would drive many siblings to the edge of violence.

But gymnasts are not as other people. The Downies’ whole lives are based around repetition; incremental improvements to their gravity-defying moves. They are as patient with each other as they  are with their daily rehab, so the conversation  consists more of gentle leg-pulling than of  genuine jibes.

Becky and her sister train for five to six hours each day
Becky and Ellie train for five to six hours each day Credit: Daniel Stier 

‘Ellie was going to school up until last summer, and that was our break from each other,’ Becky says. ‘Whereas now we’re glued at the hip.

'We wake up together, we’re in the house together, in the gym together, in the car together. The worst thing about Ellie is that she’s not a very nice person in the morning.

Sometimes we come in here and our other teammate Jess [Coombs] is like, “Woah, what happened to you two this morning?” But  I know she doesn’t mean it.’

At 16, Ellie could almost be Becky’s twin. They estimate that they are mistaken for each other 10 times a day, despite an eight-year age difference.

‘Becky can moan a little bit too much,’ Ellie says, ‘but apart from that it’s just little things. I don’t like loud music in the car, and she does. I want the window down and she wants it up. It was worse when we were in the same room for a year, but thank God our brother Josh went to university.’

She giggles, as they both do throughout  our conversation. When I play my tape back, it  features the sort of hilarity more often found on a sitcom soundtrack. This chimes with the spirit of British gymnastics – a sport adapting to its sudden visibility, and loving every moment.

Take the national championships as an example. Until 2011, they were held at the Guildford Spectrum, a local leisure centre, in front of a few hundred fans. But the imminence of the London Olympics prompted a major upgrade, to the 9,000-seater Echo Arena in Liverpool.

Now tickets sell out in days, and the athletes walk out to Carmina Burana, plumes of dry ice and a laser-light show. As for the international stage, the London Games proved a watershed, as captain Louis Smith led the men to their first Olympic team medal in exactly 100 years.

Now, such rewards are commonplace. At this year’s European Championships, both the men and women took team silver behind Russia. ‘It’s amazing how many youngsters want to get involved in the sport,’ Becky says. ‘Parents tell me their kids can’t even get into a club, because of the waiting lists.

After last year’s Worlds were on the BBC, people were coming up to us and saying, “You’re our idols.” It’s pretty crazy but it’s amazing to know what kind of impact we have. Hopefully after the Games it will increase and we can keep the next few generations involved.’

Later, I speak to Smith, the pommel-horse specialist who gave gymnastics another boost when he won Strictly Come Dancing in 2012. In Smith’s view, Great Britain’s sudden eminence in artistic gymnastics (as opposed to the rhythmic form involving ribbons and hoops) is not solely the result of enthusiastic juniors and world-class coaching – although these are both factors.

There is also the decline of the Eastern bloc, traditionally the heartland of handsprings. ‘I think belief has been such a strong part of British gymnastics’ rise,’ Smith says. ‘When  I started, in 2004, the seniors hadn’t sent a [men’s] team to Athens.

We had our funding cut after that Olympic cycle. But people like me and Beth Tweddle slowly built a foundation  at the European and World Championships.  UK Sport would say, “Get one medal at the Worlds,” we’d hit that target, and that’s how we built the funding up step by step.

‘We got more national coaches and developed our junior programme. The mistake some countries have made – places like Bulgaria, Belarus, Ukraine – is that they have failed to invest in the next generation. Romania, the nation of Nadia Comăneci, hasn’t even qualified for the men’s or women’s team events in Rio. It’s crazy.’

These are indeed boom times for British gymnastics. Yet life in a leotard is not all smiles and podium finishes. For all its beauty, this is a cruel sport physically, and an even crueller one mentally.

Becky Downie may have developed into arguably the finest exponent of uneven bars in the world, but she is also the survivor of a crushing disappointment – her omission from the 2012 Olympic team – that left her struggling to eat, sleep or think straight.

Becky is hard-headed enough to insist that this rejection ‘made me the person I am today’. She turned her despair into fuel, claiming the uneven-bars gold medal at the 2014 European Championships, and reprising the triumph in Bern last month. Yet she also acknowledges that, ‘It wasn’t a nice process to go through.’

Recalling the phone call that broke the news, she says, ‘I didn’t really hear anything he said except for, “You haven’t made the team.” I probably cried for a good month. I would describe it as like when someone dies – that’s literally what it felt like. I didn’t want to eat; nothing would make me happy.

Ellie at the World Championships qualifications in October, 2015
Ellie at the World Championships qualifications in October, 2015 Credit: ALAN EDWARDS / Alamy Stock Photo

‘I still had to go up to the pre-London training camp as a reserve, but it was really hard being there. I came home each week, and  I remember Ellie and my other sister, Gemma, baking me a cake. Then, the next week, they said, “Ah, we’ve got a surprise for you, sit down,” and they just dropped this little kitten into my arms.

We called him Rio and we still have him. Just little things like that kept  me going. But I wouldn’t say I really found myself again until the end of 2013.’ Ellie was 12. She remembers her sister’s suffering, even if it seemed mysterious from her pre-teen perspective.

‘I didn’t really understand. I get it now – I’d be gutted if I thought  I wasn’t going to go to Rio. But back then I just thought, “Why are you so sad?” ’ As they both erupt into laughter at this poignant, complicated memory, I start to wonder whether the humour is partly a coping mechanism, a defence against the dark side of their way of life.

It is a quirk of gymnastics that the athletes – particularly the women – are expected to project a sense of ease and elegance at all times, even though their bodies are constantly on the point of rebellion. In February, the American gymnast McKayla Maroney broke the omertà  in an interview with the GymCastic podcast. 

Becky Downie is the leader of the women's team
Becky is the leader of the women's team Credit: Reuters

At the London Olympics, she claimed, she was told that she should grin and bear the pain of  a broken toe or risk being demoted. ‘Unless you actually go to a competition or see the athletes train, it’s hard to understand what a tough sport this is,’ says Barbara Slater, the head of BBC Sport and a former inter-national gymnast, who competed against Comăneci in the 1970s.

‘As soon as you walk into a gym,’ Slater adds, ‘it all comes back, that shared experience of blistered hands and bruised muscles. With the Downie sisters, there’s a respect between two women who know what it takes. Mistime some of these moves and you are looking at injuries, potentially serious ones.

Becky on the beam at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, Glasgow
Becky on the beam at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, Glasgow Credit: Robert Perry/REX/Shutterstock

Which is why there is such a strong camaraderie there. At the Commonwealth Games, you could see all the girls cheering for each other, and I don’t just mean their own teammates.’

 Slater has backed the sport strongly on BBC TV, enlisting The One Show’s Matt Baker – another former  competitive gymnast – as her anchorman.

Last year’s World Championships in Glasgow delivered a triumph for the BBC’s embattled sport department, drawing a peak audience of 2.5 million, which compares favourably with more established competitions such as the World Snooker or World Athletics Championships.

The highlight of the competition in Glasgow was the bronze claimed by the women’s team – their first such medal at this level. It was secured by Ellie’s concluding vault, which she nailed despite having earlier fallen from the uneven bars. ‘Even then I didn’t think we could medal because of my earlier mistake,’ she recalls.

‘But then I hadn’t realised that the Russians had fallen on the beam a couple of times. So when the scores came in I was just like, “Aaah.” And then I started crying.’ She giggles delightedly, in typical Downie style. ‘I always said when Ellie was a junior that she’ll be better than me when she’s older,’ Becky says.

Louis Smith of Great Britain in action on the Pommel Horse during the London 2012 Olympics
Louis Smith of Great Britain in action on the Pommel Horse during the London 2012 Olympics Credit: Getty Images

‘If she keeps going the way she is then I definitely foresee a vault medal, and we haven’t had a vault medal, a major one, so that’s going to be history.’ And then comes the crafty dig. ‘Vault’s one of those pieces that is pretty easy compared to the others. She can’t even  lie and say it’s not. She just runs and puts the power down.’

 For all the Downies’ many qualities, they may as well abandon hope of  winning the team gold in Rio. There is no safer bet at the whole Olympiad than the US women, anchored as they are by the bewilderingly superior Simone Biles.

A recent New Yorker profile explained that, ‘In a sport often contested in hundredths of a point, Biles wins by whole numbers.’ Her difficulty tariff is so high that she can afford to botch a couple of moves, not that she often does. But while Biles may be the runaway favourite for the all-around, the floor and the beam,  she is unlikely to win all six gold medals.

In  the uneven bars, it is Becky who owns perhaps the most difficult routine in the world – a 15.500-tariff combination constructed from exotic-sounding elements such as Tkatchevs, Shangs and a full-twisting double-tuck dismount. ‘Yeah, this routine has given me a lot of grief,’ she says, with another of those disarming laughs.

‘In Glasgow for the Worlds, I peaked a week too early and my body had started to wind down before we got there. But if I can pull it off I think it’s going to be amazing.’ When we speak, she has just come back  from Rio, where she performed in the test event without quite coming to terms with the local apparatus.

As spectators, we might imagine that one gym would be much the same  as the next, but performers pick up on the  smallest variations in size and rigidity. And  the uneven bars – much more than the vault, beam or floor – are the trickiest piece to which to adapt.

Britain’s Louis Smith on the pommel horse during the 2012 Olympics in London, where he won silver
Britain’s Louis Smith on the pommel horse during the 2012 Olympics in London, where he won silver Credit: Getty Images

‘I had a mistake on my first release move,’ Becky says, ‘and then when I got up I somehow managed to totally miss my catch on the next skill and land on my face on the bar.’ Both Downies chuckle dutifully. ‘Still, my training in Rio was probably the best it’s been, so in some ways you just have to laugh it off and hope it won’t happen again.

‘The other good thing is that I’ve been  away and I haven’t seen Ellie for a while. So today we’re on good terms.’ She beams protectively at her younger sister. ‘Yeah, I’d say we’re all right.’ 

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