Ellie meanwhile opted out of the Olympic trials altogether, unable to imagine herself in a gym at all. “When such a big life event like that happens, you really kind of question everything you’re doing,” she says quietly. “Whether you need to do something else with your life. For me, at that moment, my gymnastic spark died a little bit.”

It was a feeling that had grown within her for months. After lockdown Ellie was blighted by a back injury and other niggles which hampered her Tokyo preparations. Like Becky, she felt ostracised by those within the national team set up, after the sisters sent shockwaves through the sport with their joint statement last year calling out British Gymnastics and sharing allegations of emotional abuse and weight shaming.

‘I was trying to push myself… but I couldn’t even go into the gym’

It culminated in Ellie, Britain’s first major all-around champion gymnast, feeling disconnected from the sport she loved. “I know it’s kind of weird, maybe horrible to say, but if what happened to Josh happened to me, I would have died miserably,” Ellie says with candour. “I wasn’t happy at all. It was a constant struggle. Josh was the final straw – I think it made me crack a bit.

“After Josh, I was just trying to push, push, push but I couldn’t even go into the fitness gym. I’d sit on the bike and couldn’t push myself to do it properly. That was a really big worry for me. I was getting more and more sad.”

Ellie was so convinced her gymnastics career was over she went for a trial athletics session with Olympic bronze medallist heptathlete Kelly Sotherton. Despite it going well, she wasn’t sure it was the right time to switch. Then, a month ago, Ellie took a make or break holiday, and upon returning believed she was “done” with gymnastics. 

Eventually she took the advice of those around her and started seeing a counsellor. “I was quite reluctant,” she says. “I am a talker, but not really about my emotions – I’ll just make jokes to kind of avoid it. But there was just too much this year.” As well as Josh’s death, the Downie’s grandmother passed away in late 2020 and their father had a serious Covid scare which saw him hospitalised.

“Speaking [to a counsellor] is helping I think. I was just bottling everything up. In the sessions we tried to dig into what I enjoy in gymnastics and what made me not enjoy it.” Slowly, Ellie began to regain her motivation and returned to the gym.

Out of the tragedy and disappointments of the past year, both gymnasts exude a feeling of hopefulness which they could not have imagined a few weeks ago. Becky insists she is taking heart from her performance at the World Championships, despite coming home empty handed. 

“I just had to keep reminding myself that I was doing it for myself, and I wasn’t doing it for anybody else,” she says. She believes she was ready to challenge for a medal in uneven bars at the Olympics in August. But missing out and being forced to extend her peak to October for Worlds pushed her to “burnout”. 

Among the challenges, a silver lining emerged. Her first time back in a British Gymnastics team environment since her Olympic trials, which she felt were poorly handled by the governing body through her bereavement, she noticed positive developments in the national squad while at the World Championships. 

It is progress that she believes came about as a result of the Gymnastics Alliance movement last year, which highlighted abuse and unhealthy methods in the sport.