The shifts in the life of Louis Smith have, in the 18 months since I interviewed him previously, been immense. In terms of his acumen on the pommel horse they have been less dramatic — but, then, the difference between winning and being an also-ran in his event is often minuscule.
Smith became a household name after his bronze-medal display in Beijing. He won Britain’s first Olympic medal in men’s gymnastics in 100 years and emerged as a favourite for a gold medal in 2012. Much is made of how home soil gives British competitors an emotional advantage but in Smith’s case the boost is more concrete.
After years of just failing to clinch the marks required to seize high-profile victories, Smith hopes that the judges will be swayed by his fame and the home crowd.
“It can get quite personal,” he says of the marking system. “There’s always going to be controversy because there’s judges involved. If you jump a certain distance, you’ve jumped it, there’s no decisions made.” The judges, he says, are inevitably influenced by the reputation of those they assess.
“If a nobody came in and competed against me, and, let’s say, both routines were exactly the same, I’d probably get slightly above [them in marks], because of who I am and what I’ve done in the past. It’s happened to me. I did a fantastic routine in Rotterdam at the [2010 Artistic Gymnastics] World Championships, and I came just behind Krisztian Berki, who has more or less always beaten me. I feel I did the much better routine and I was just a tenth [of a point] behind him. It was another example, of ‘All right, I’ll wait until next time’.”
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Smith’s path to the London Games continues this week at the Artistic Gymnastics European Championships in Berlin. In many ways, he is the Brit most likely to peak at the right time come the Olympics. He will be 23, the optimum age for an artistic gymnast, and is not afraid to acknowledge that “everything is a stepping stone to 2012”.
A year and half ago, he was a shy lad living with his mother. He knew he had won “only” a bronze medal because he was inexperienced and without a British role model in the discipline.
Since then, he has moved out of his mother’s house, has a girlfriend, is less inhibited about his beloved singing and has secured top-notch sponsorship that brings him a fancy car, even fancier television commercials and the sort of elite, ushered-through-check-in style of treatment at airports, courtesy of British Airways, that would appease the most demanding of rock stars.
“The last thing you want, as a sportsman travelling, is to be getting stressed,” he says.
But Smith is generally more relaxed these days. Even though he had entered auditions for the X Factor, he was reluctant to sing for The Times a year and a half ago. This time around, he warbles without being asked and enjoys watching a rerun of how he led the Sport Relief choir last year. Being chosen by Gareth Malone to take the solo lead for the fund-raising rendition of Always on my Mind helped to assuage the disappointment of being rejected by Simon Cowell.
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“They’ve seen me on Sport Relief cracking some high notes,” Smith, who gave up a choral scholarship for gymnastics, says. “That was my little stamp on things. There you go; I can pommel horse and sing. It was nice to get a second chance.”
Smith is not your average artistic gymnast. He knows he is the wrong shape and build but he is also different from the rest mentally. His competitors, he says, spend too much time online researching what each other is up to. “That’s too much,” he says. “I like to sit back. I like to go into a competition not knowing what a guy’s been doing and just do my routine, then psyche him out.” His fellow gymnasts worry, to the point of adapting routines to counter what they have seen in training.
“People always think about winning, whereas I concentrate on doing a clean routine, so I can look at someone and think, ‘Oh, he’s improved, that looks nice.’ But I don’t think, ‘Oh, he’s going to stop me from winning.’” Errors will creep in, he says, if you respond to what rivals are doing.
“There’s a fine line between cocky and confident,” he says. “If you try to make your routine extra special, that’s when you change things, and that’s when mistakes happen.
“Nothing will change in competition. Nothing. If I’m not good enough to win, I’m not good enough.”
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The road to Berlin
• The fourth European Championships begin on Wednesday at the Max-Schmeling-Halle in Berlin. Britain is taking ten competitors with Smith, Beth Tweddle and Dan Purvis expected to win medals.
• Smith took silver on the pommel at last year’s European and World Championships. Tweddle, the three-times world champion, is the European champion on both bars and floor from 2009 and 2010. Purvis took the European floor bronze medal last year and repeated the feat at the World Championships.
• This week’s event represents the gymnasts’ final chance to fine-tune their routines before October’s World Championships, scheduled to be held in Tokyo, which are the route to qualification for the 2012 Games.