Medal-winning Alice Kinsella holds family bragging rights over dad Mark
Playing at a World Cup is one thing but an Olympic medal is quite another and Alice Kinsella insists she has the family bragging rights over dad Mark after a thrilling gymnastics bronze.
Sutton Coldfield’s Kinsella and teammates Amelie Morgan and twin sisters Jennifer and Jessica Gadirova stormed to an unlikely medal on another heart-racing night at Tokyo 2020.
Kinsella, whose brother Liam plays football for Walsall, is aged 20 and trains at Telford-based Park Wrekin Gymnastics Club.
She was in tears after falling off both the beam and uneven bars in qualification, but rebounded and was at the heart of Team GB’s remarkable recovery after they sat seventh at the halfway stage.
And she can now claim to be the best sportsperson in the family, upstaging ex-Villa and Albion footballer Mark, who played for Ireland at the 2002 World Cup.
“It feels amazing following in my dad's footsteps,” she said. “Obviously an Olympic medal (is better).
“It obviously crosses your mind now and then but our main aim was to go and do better than qualification, go and enjoy it, and we did.
“On the beam, we had one fall and we put that behind us, we smashed it and went to the floor and smashed that.
"We then aced vault and that's when we knew we could do this. Then we nailed the bars and we did it.
“Obviously after vault I looked up and thought ok we could potentially get a medal. So I thought I'm going to go and do the best bar routine I could ever do, which I did, I got a personal best, so I'm really happy with that, then we saw we came third I was speechless, on the floor, crying and everything.”
Morgan delivered the decisive moment, as she nailed an uneven bars routine, as Team GB came back from the dead.
At the halfway stage, they were second last and seemingly out of contention but their night changed on the vault as the Gadirova twins both earned 14.433s from the judges and Kinsella was close behind on 14.266.
That left them fifth and still with an outside chance of a medal going to the uneven bars.
Jessica Gadirova went first, scoring 13.566 before Kinsella (14.166) and Morgan (14.033) produced the routine of their lives.
That momentarily put Team GB top but they were swiftly overtaken by Russia and USA, leaving all eyes on Italy.
Team GB had a 39.564 point buffer and Italy, on the beam, came in just below with a 39.108 combined.
“I feel like now knowing we've come away with a medal it can really up our confidence for the future,” Kinsella added.
“It's always individual but winning a bronze on the team it feels even better, because obviously it's been quite hard training but we just know now that our training has paid off.
“We've shown we can do it and proved to them we are able to do it and we've came away with bronze.”
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