A far cry from the freezing barn with a couple of parallel bars that was the lot when Tweddle started off as a six year old 20 years ago.

“There’s no comparison,” she says. “When I first started, people felt they were going into the worlds with one hand tied behind their back.

"That’s if they qualified at all. Now, you really go there thinking you have a chance.”

And Tweddle has a chance in Tokyo all right. Not just individually, where her prowess on the bars remains unsurpassed, but in the team category, where Britain is now one of the top five teams. Everything has changed in her outlook, except this: the chalk. Slapped on the hands to absorb the sweat, there are clouds of the stuff all over the gym.

“It’s a right pain,” she says, examining her chalk-encrusted palms. “After a session you can have two or three showers and it’s still embedded in you.

"You seem to find it everywhere. Like most gymnasts, I don’t like the feel of chalk when I’m not in the gym. It’s kind of sharp and just gets in your knuckles and goes right through you.”

You might wonder, given her antipathy to the major tool of her trade, why she keeps going back to the gym. After all, this is a young person’s sport.

And at 26 she is almost geriatric in gymnastics terms, a good decade older than many of those against whom she will be competing this weekend.

“I always thought I’d retire in 2006,” she admits. “But I didn’t do as well as I wanted to at the Commonwealths that year, I got injured. So that spurred me on to stay for Beijing.

"After Beijing I really thought that was it. Coming fourth was the hardest. Normally if I don’t do as well as I want, I balance out pretty quick.

"But Beijing was hard to get your head round. First couple of days after flying back, everything was about how well Team GB had done, we had our own flight back, medallists in business class, and I wasn’t part of that. So I went to a travel agent and said, sort me a flight tomorrow.

"I went off with my flat mate, wondering if that was it. But she said to me after about three days it was obvious I wanted to be back in the gym training, working to put it right. Which is what I’ve done. Disappointment makes you stronger.”

Like many British athletes, what really kept her going was the thought of next summer. “Had it not been in London people ask would I have stepped aside.

"Well, I still enjoy the training, I still have a good relationship with my coach, I still want to win. But obviously it was a massive spur to me.

"To compete in a home Olympics if you get the chance you’re not going to turn it down, are you?” Thus she remains the senior citizen not just of the team but of her sport, its most visible and marketable asset. With all that, presumably, comes an additional weight of responsibility.

“I wouldn’t necessarily call it responsibility,” she says. “I’ve grown up with the girls. I guess they do look up to me but I don’t see that as an added pressure.

"I tend to keep myself to myself in the camp. Maybe if the girls go shopping on a half day I’ll go with them, but in the evenings I tend to do my own thing. I’m doing an Open Un course in economics and business studies, so I study.”

Tweddle leads her compatriots to Tokyo looking to secure qualification for next year’s fiesta in the dome, where the Olympic gymnastics will take place in front of 25,000 partisan supporters.

“It’ll be amazing. But I think the awareness that our sport is more than just the Olympics is growing, people are picking up on it. Everyone says when they watch gymnastics they love it, even if the scoring can be complicated.

"That’s what I’d advise anyone to do: watch the world’s, you won’t regret it.” 

The Telegraph 6/10/11