Max Whitlock
Max Whitlock is Team GB’s most successful Olympic gymnast in history, boasting 14 medals and six titles across Olympic and World Championships. In partnership with adidas, Max ins...
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Who are you?
I am Max Whitlock, TGB gymnast, and I've been lucky to be able to do my sport for 24 years. I'm now classed as a retired athlete, which feels very strange, but I still class myself as a true athlete.
How do you get into gymnastics?
I started gymnastics when I was seven years old, so just a young kid. And I originally done swimming. I followed in my brother's footsteps of being a swimmer and a friend from the swimming club said I should come along and give gymnastics a try. I was lucky. It was in the same sports centre, it was in the same place. So there and there. He got me to try a few basic gymnastics skills on the floor and I could kind of pick it up quick. So he said, get in a gym, give it a go. And I stepped foot in there and I loved it. Since day one, I got hooked and I got obsessed with the sense of achievement constantly, the thousands and hundreds of thousands skills that you could learn. And I loved it from day one, and I never stopped loving it throughout my whole career.
Can you remember your first flip?
I dunno if I do remember the first time I did a flip. Oh, months, years to learn any kind of skill. And I think what's really important is that knowing that you don't just go from zero to a hundred, I think you don't just learn a somersault, go in and you want to learn it, and then there we go, you achieve it. It's actually, there's probably about 10 to 20 even sometimes more stages towards learning a skill and the same with every single skill. So I think learning a flip, learning a somersault, I think for me probably come at around age 10 ish, three years into starting gymnastics. So everything takes time.