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ELIZABETH TWEDDLE
Official website: www.bethtweddle.com
Elizabeth Kimberly Tweddle (born April 1, 1985, Johannesburg, South Africa), better known as
Beth Tweddle, is the most decorated British gymnast of all time. She is the current European Champion
and a former (2006) World Champion on the uneven bars.
Tweddle hails from Bunbury, Cheshire, in the northwest of England, and began gymnastics at the age of seven. Training
with her coach, 1984 Olympic yymnast Amanda Kirby (nee Harrison) at the City of Liverpool Gymnastics Club, Beth won her
first British National Championships in 2001, an achievement she would repeat every year through 2007. She also helped
her club team, Liverpool, win the British Team Championships four consecutive times.
In her World Championships debut in 2001, Tweddle placed 24th in the all-around final. She would improve drastically in
2002, when she won a bronze medal on the uneven bars at the European Championships in Patras, Greece. Her medal was the first
ever for a British gymnast at Europeans. Later in the same year, she finished a close fourth in the bars final at the World
Championships and won three medals at the Commonwealth Games: silver in the team final and all-around and gold on the uneven bars.
In 2003 Beth became the first UK female gymnast to medal at the World Championships with a bronze on the bars.
2004 began as a promising year for Tweddle; she won a silver medal on the uneven bars at the European Championships,
second only to double Olympic and septuple World Champion Svetlana Khorkina.
She competed on the UK team at the 2004 Olympics in Athens and was considered an excellent prospect for a medal on bars,
but barely missed qualifying for the event final. There was disappointment too in the all-around final, where she fell
twice from beam. Her 17th place was the best ever achieved by a British woman, but clearly she was capable of better.
Despite a below par Olympics and the fact that the rest of the team had retired, Beth continued to train hard and came
back with a vengeance at the 2004 World Cup Final in Birmingham. The first British woman ever to qualify, she thrilled the
home crowd with an upgraded bar routine which included a Khorkina I to Geinger release combination. However, she lost to
American Chellsie Memmel by 0.013, a tiny margin in gymnastics. China's
Li Ya, who finished third, expressed her disquiet with the result, arguing that Tweddle
was superior. However Beth herself filed no protest, and went on to finish fifth in the floor finals.
Beth began 2005 with a bang in the preliminaries of the European Championships, qualifying second to the all-around
and top eight on every event. However, in a pattern that was to become familiar, she had to withdraw through injury.
There was more luck, however, at the 2005 World Championships in Australia. There, Beth finished 4th in the all-around,
easily the best ever finish from a Briton. She injured herself in the warm-up for bars finals, though still managing a bronze.
However she had to withdraw from floor finals because of this.
Tweddle had aspirations to compete in the 2006 Commonwealth Games. However, she was forced to withdraw from the meet
with an injury. She recuperated in time to compete in the 2006 European Championships, where she captured the uneven
bars title with a performance that scored a full point ahead of that of the next competitor. With her win, Tweddle became
the first British gymnast ever to win a gold medal at Europeans.
Tweddle's great strength is the uneven bars; she is one of the only women currently competing a routine with two
consecutive high bar release moves. However, she has also emerged as a strong all-around gymnast and a floor exercise
specialist in recent years, qualifying for the all-around and floor exercise event finals at many international competitions.
Tweddle is known not only for her accomplishments on bars, but also for competitive misfortunes. At the 2005 Europeans,
she qualified in second place to the all-around and had the potential to medal in all four event finals, but she injured
herself during the all-around competition and had to withdraw, leaving with nothing. At the 2005 World Championships, she
injured her knee immediately before the bars finals. While she competed on the event and won a medal, she had to withdraw
from the floor competition the next day. Tweddle was also forced to withdraw from the 2006 Commonwealth Games when she
suffered an ankle injury in training. With hit performances, several medals were possible and she would have been the
clear favorite for golds on bars, floor and in the all-aruond. Understandably therefore, Beth was disappointed. However,
later in 2006 her luck was to change spectacularly.
In October 2006, Tweddle became Britain's first ever gymnastics World Champion by winning the uneven bars event with
a score of 16.200 in the 2006 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Aarhus, Denmark. In doing so, she beat reigning
champion Nastia Liukin of the USA into second place. Beth's title was a historic
achievement for a Briton; Neil Thomas took a brace of silvers on floor in the 1990s, but nobody else had ever come close.
The performance was all the more remarkable because Beth had previously been less than perfect on bars in the competition;
she had only qualified in fifth place and had fallen in the all-around, where a clean routine would probably have helped her
to a medal. Nonetheless, she was able to perform her very difficult routine cleanly and the reward was the highest score of
the entire championship. Beth also performed cleanly in floor finals to finish fifth, and was less than half a tenth
away from bronze.
As a result of this success, Beth came third in the prestigious 2006 BBC Sports Personality of the Year, which was decided
by a public vote. She was the first ever British gymnast to even make the shortlist, though
Nadia Comaneci and Olga Korbut have both
won in the foreign athletes category.
The week after her BBC success, Beth competed in her final competition of the year, the World Cup Finals. Here, she took
the bars title once again, narrowly beating the exciting Chinese athlete Li Ya. Tweddle's
routine was less difficult, but better form scores gave her the gold. This was followed by a silver on floor, Beth's first
major medal on that apparatus. She finished 2006 as World, European and World Cup champion on the bars.
Beth failed to retain her World Championship title in Stuttgart on September 8, 2007, when she finished fourth.
She hopes to continue at least until the 2008 Olympics, where she will take her second shot at Olympic glory, and
perhaps until the 2009 World Championships in London.
She currently divides her time between her training and her studies at Liverpool John Moores University, where she
is in her final year. Eventually, Beth would like to become a physiotherapist.
For more information, visit her
profile page on the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique website.
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