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Katy Lennon is the senior member of the British Olympic Squad aiming for Athens 2004. She was born in Carshalton, South London, on October 16th 1984 and grew up not far away in Surrey's Mole Valley, where the family lives in Walton-on-the-Hill, just outside Tadworth. Katy has been in gymnastics since 1989 when she joined a local gym club, Leatherhead & Dorking. However, her family's involvement with the sport goes back much further. Katy's mum Karen was a national squad gymnast herself and even represented Great Britain in a couple of minor competitions. It was Karen, by then a coach, who introduced her daughter to gymnastics. Katy also has a sporty father, Fred - a competitive cyclist. Her brother Alex is three years her junior, and they have a baby half-brother, Joe, who has just started nursery, as well as a pet cat called Archie.
Katy's early years at Leatherhead & Dorking coincided with the arrival at the club of Vladimir Aksenov - legendary coach to Soviet world champions Elvira Saadi and Olga Mostepanova. From the age of 6, Katy had the good fortune to be trained by the Russian master, who equipped her with excellent basic techniques. Under Aksenov's guidance, Katy achieved great success as a young gymnast. She only participated in two national age group competitions but emerged victorious from both. Katy became the first-ever Espoir British Champion when the new sub-junior category was added to the British Championships in 1997. In fact, she almost swept the board at this event, picking up the apparatus titles on vault, beam and floor as well as the all-around crown.
Despite her success, Katy left the sport for a while at this point. Fortunately she returned with a vengeance in 1999, winning vault gold at the junior British and gaining selection for the European Youth Olympic Days where she made both the all-around and vault finals. Barely age-eligible for the Sydney Olympic Games, Katy had to defer to her more experienced compatriots as a first-year senior in 2000. However, after a wave of post-Olympic retirements, she emerged as one of the new frontrunners in 2001, staking her claim early on with a superb performance at the prestigious Romanian International where she placed an impressive 5th AA in a strong field. Katy was a key member of the 2001 World Championships team that finished in a record 9th place. She made more history in 2002, contributing four scores to GB's European Championships effort that produced the team's best ever result (6th). After placing 3rd AA and winning vault at the 2002 senior British championships, Katy helped England earn team silver at the Manchester Commonwealth Games, qualifying to the vault and floor finals as an individual. A nasty elbow injury meant that she was sidelined for nearly all of 2003 but she has made an impressive comeback in this Olympic year, looking strong, sharp and very competitive. Katy made the vault final at the 2004 World Cup competition in Cottbus and placed 5th on the same piece at the Olympic test event in Athens.
Since 2000 Katy has been based permanently at Lilleshall National Sports Centre in Shropshire where she is a full-time gymnast on the centralized training programme. She has long excelled on the power event, vault, but is also known for her precise and stylish beam and floor work. Katy has described floor as her favourite piece. Bars has always been a relative weakness, but she has worked hard to improve in this area. In her spare time Katy enjoys shopping and going the cinema. Her all-time favourite film is 'Dirty Dancing'. She is also a fan of urban music, citing R&B and Hip-hop as her favourite styles. The 5 foot-tall gymnast stands on the verge of achieving her ultimate ambition of competing in the 2004 Olympic Games.
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