Gymnastics: Belle of the bars lays her hands on a little glory

British gymnastics may have unearthed a genuine star. Alan Hubbard reports on swinging fortunes for Beth Tweddle

No doubt about the top attraction in the Commonwealth Games. While the titans of track, pool and boxing ring may grab the headlines, gymnastics draws the crowds. Manchester's G-Mex Arena, which stages the sport over the first four days, was sold out within hours of tickets being available. So, thank heavens for little girls, eh – though as it happens they are not so little any more. They get bigger every Games. And not just at the box office.

Those packing the vast arena will be witnessing something of a revolution. The days of gaunt-faced, anorexic pixies are no more. Last weekend's British Women's Championships at Guildford in Surrey witnessed the new shape of gymnastics today, and it is decidedly more Kylie than Twiggy.

Amanda Kirby, currently the most successful club coach in the country – her City of Liverpool girls made a clean sweep of all three major titles – explains that now there is more emphasis on strength and athleticism.

"The sport hasn't really changed, neither have the skills required. But the training workload has. The time when young gymnasts were all skin and bone has passed. Now you need all-round fitness and a bit more muscle."

Zoltan Jordanov, the national coach imported from Hungary, who has done much to push British gymnastics closer to the top of the international medal podium than it has ever been, also points out that in the Eighties the average age when a female gymnast was past her competitive sell-by date was 18. "Now it is not unusual to see them competing at well into their twenties, 30 even."

Thanks to the input of coaches such as Jordanov and Kirby, who will be marshalling England's Games squad, British gymnastics has come on in leaps and bounds. The nation may not be able to boast anyone as coquettish as Korbut or as clever as Comaneci, but the proliferation of teenagers doing their fling at the Guildford Spectrum suggested that gold won't be in short supply in Manchester, where the main, perhaps only, worthy opposition will come from Australia and Canada in both men's and women's individual and team events.

The brightest prospect of them all is a 17-year-old from Cheshire, Beth Tweddle, one of Kirby's charges at the club she runs in the unlikely gymnastics hotspot of Toxteth in Liverpool, where bars and beams usually have a rather different connotation.

They are trying desperately hard not to overhype her, but Tweddle might just be the best gymnast the nation has produced. At the recent European Championships in Patros, Greece, she became the first British female ever to win a medal, taking bronze in a high-calibre event won by the double Olympic and six-times world champion Svetlana Khorkina. To get a foothold on the same podium as the Russian wonder-woman was a significant milestone for Britain.

At Guildford, the pony-tailed Tweddle successfully defended her British senior title in some style. Her speciality is the asymmetric bars, and coach Kirby, who competed herself in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, believes she has the ability not only to swing her way to victory in Manchester, but perhaps, in two years' time, achieve the best Olympics result Britain has had since a team bronze in 1928, when only five countries competed.

"The great thing about Beth is her mental strength," Kirby says. "She is not exceptionally talented physically but she works tremendously hard. Her determination and dedication are phenomenal."

As a tot, Tweddle was always hanging around. Or rather, hanging upside down, from banisters and bedposts. Or vaulting over the sofa. So her parents took the seven-year-old to a local gymnastics club "to get rid of my excess energy" and 10 years on she has emerged as not only the cover girl for the British Championships programme but one of four featured personalities on the Games commemorative postage stamps.

Determination is certainly the name of her game. The line between perfection and pain is as delicately balanced as a pair of feet on the beam, and she has had to bounce back after breaking an ankle three years ago.

She has been coached by Kirby since 1997, making the two-hour round trip from her village home at Bunbury to Liverpool every evening after school – she is currently taking her A-levels – for a four-hour training session. Her mother, Ann, and father, Jerry, do the chauffeuring. Her supportive parents, she says, were both "very sporty" and her brother James, 19, is an England Under-21 hockey international.

Tweddle herself was a useful sprinter and long jumper before gymnastics totally took over her sporting life. Her talent for athletics has helped her to become a better gymnast because she can more easily absorb the vigorous training schedules devised by her coach. "Gymnastics is a much tougher sport than it seems. It may all look very pretty but it is about hard graft. The strength and the different skills you have to apply are as demanding as any other sport, probably more than most."

It is 30 years since Olga Korbut enticed the world to switch on to gymnastics, and despite the limited television exposure it receives outside the Olympics it has retained its allure, though the borderline between sport and showbiz is frequently obliterated, especially when floor exercises are performed to music. "All That Jazz" seemed an appropriate theme for this particular element at Guildford. Tweddle conservatively chose a Greek number, a reminder, perhaps, of her achievement there recently and an omen for what might be in Athens in 2004, once the Manchester mission is accomplished.

As well as the bronze medal on the bars in the European Championships she was seventh in the beam final and finished 14th overall. At a subsequent grand prix event in Germany, she took the gold and recently beat the top Romanians. So she is not just a pretty new face on the scene.

She reckons she will stick at it, too, unlike the last British girl to be touted as having a world-class future. Lisa Mason, a Commonwealth Games gold medallist in Kuala Lumpur, who could have given Denise Lewis a run for the title of sport's body beautiful, has given it all up to become a stunt girl and model.

Tweddle, although curvaceous enough, has no such cheesy aspirations. She plans to study biology and physics at university and then train to be a physiotherapist. But, now that the sport has become less rigid, she has a good half-a-dozen years ahead of her in which to twist, somersault, leap and dance her way to a golden future. British sport could be swinging on a star.