Scott Hann is essential to the success of Britain’s most successful artistic gymnast, Max Whitlock, with the pair’s journey yielding six Olympic medals, including three gold. With Paris 2024 potentially another step on the road to making more history, the odyssey continues.
(2016 Getty Images)
It was after the Delhi Commonwealth Games in 2010 that Scott Hann knew he had a potential artistic gymnastics diamond on his hands in 17-year-old Max Whitlock. A former gymnast himself, Hann had been coaching Whitlock since he was 12 years old at the South Essex Gymnastics Club in England, but until the competition in India – a first foray onto the senior international scene for both – he saw the youngster as maybe fourth or fifth best in a group of gymnasts he was training at the time.
“Every time he went away, I’d get comments like, ‘oh he’s a little bit scruffy in training’, or ‘he doesn’t look like the best athlete’,” Hann said in a UK Coaching video in August. “But every time he went into a competition arena and put his arm up, he was by far the best. Even if he wasn’t winning, he was the best competitor by a country mile.”
Twelve years on from Delhi and the duo were celebrating a sixth Olympic medal together – a gold on pommel horse at Tokyo 2020, defending the title he’d first won in Rio 2016, where Whitlock also won the floor title and an incredible bronze in the individual all-around.
Two bronze medals at London 2012, on pommel horse and in the team event – the latter a first British men’s artistic gymnastics team medal in 100 years – saw a 19-year-old Whitlock immediately make his mark behind another trailblazing pommel horse specialist, Louis Smith. The latter's bronze medal at Beijing 2008 was the first individual medal won at the Olympic Games by a British gymnast since 1908.
A multitude of world, European and Commonwealth accolades pepper the years, but a tilt at Paris 2024 seemed less likely when Whitlock took time out from the sport after Tokyo and struggled to find the motivation to continue.
However, a year on from Japan, Whitlock competed in his first competition, the Scottish Championships, and this weekend, 25-26 March, sees him take part in the British Championships in Liverpool, host of the world championships last November. He has also been selected to compete for Great Britain at the European Championships in Antalya, Turkey from 11-16 April.
A quest for a place on the men’s team, who have secured a five-team berth at Paris 2024 courtesy of their third place at the 2022 world champs, is well and truly underway.
And alongside Whitlock every step of the way is Hann.
It’s been quite the journey for the pair up to now and even prior to that moment in Delhi, the two had synchronicity to their journey.
When Whitlock took up the sport aged seven, initially training on the outskirts of northwest London at Sapphire School of Gymnastics, Hann had moved to South Essex Gymnastics Club (SEGC), east of the capital, to finish his own gymnastics career.
When Whitlock moved to SEGC aged 12, Hann was just beginning his new career. A year later, Hann took over the running of the club, and is now director of coaching. As of 2022, he is also British Gymnastics’ technical advisor, providing technical and leadership advice to the women's and men's artistic programmes.
Olympics.com spoke exclusively to the 42-year-old in February, about his own journey as coach to Britain’s most successful artistic gymnast.
“I came over to South Essex as a gymnast myself, probably about the age of 18, 19 years old, because I really wanted to give myself an opportunity to finish my career as a gymnast... It was an up-and-coming venue, so I moved over (from Bush Harlow Gymnastics Club) and started to coach around the age of 20. I took over the club about the age of about 26, 27, and the rest is history.”
“A lot of people talk about the technical aspects of coaching, in terms of your knowledge and education. Everything you learn to be able to speak to a gymnast, that technical bed of information, to grow to be the best they can be. That is important, but for me, it's more about the softer skills, the empathy around understanding the person, the holistic approach to developing a person to be able to be the best that they can be in performance.
“Building confidence is really, really essential, and that comes through dealing with adversity and actually learning from mistakes. So those are the things that I really like to focus on and that I help people with when they come to me about things because it's those small little things that can help you through all those problems and dealing with success, and obviously disaster as well. So, it's all those little things in the background for me are essential to becoming a really good coach.”
“I've progressed massively, and one thing that I took from being a gymnast myself was that knowledge, or that background knowledge, of gymnastics, but something I've really realised and learned so much over the last sort of six to eight years in particular is you don't necessarily need all of that knowledge because if you are open to getting help from people around you, that can help you fill those gaps.
“What you really need to be is driven, is passionate, is committed, and like I said before, have that holistic approach to the gymnast and to the athlete, and that will build your relationship. It's actually that relationship and that drive and that passion that will get you and the athlete to be the best that you both can possibly be."
“It's a combination of everything. After Tokyo, it was a discussion about where he's going to go next, what he was going to do. He knew he wanted some time off and I thought it was the best thing for him to have that time off and completely have it off away from the sport. So I gave him that time but as he started to struggle through that period that's when the communication started and we spoke to each other a few times.
“And then I got a phone call and the phone call was, ‘can I have a chat with you?’ And I sort of knew what it was going to be, and that was the point where he wanted to come back and give it another shot. And yeah, here we are now, just before his next competition, a whole year on from Tokyo.”
“So one of the biggest things that I learned from being a young gymnast, a young coach, and a young leader running a club, is that you need people around you. And if you actually build a good team of excellent, well-balanced, level-headed people, who are there with the same goals, the same drive, and you're all aligned in that approach, and you allow them to bring their own personalities and their own bits of expertise to the table and embrace that and move forwards, you only have to lead, not manage.
“And I think that's the key to being a good leader, to give everybody that opportunity to be the best they can be but that helps you, and you can deliver something so much more special than if you'd just done it yourself.”
“Absolutely, and I got it wrong after Rio. I came back off of Rio and I'd had the best part of four years, or certainly the year before, where everything was just full on. Everywhere we went we were waited on hand and foot, we were in hotels, we had food provided, competition, lots of success as well – and failure – but the success made you feel good. And you left the Games as a huge success and all of sudden I was at home hoovering the floor and I hadn't accounted for it, and that was a really difficult period for me.
“But it was also a really key learning opportunity for me so that when I went to Tokyo, I was really ready for that. I already had the strategies in place so that when I came back I could hit the ground running. I knew I'd have a period of time to adjust but I was ready.
“Going through something like that is really difficult and you almost have to have the tools ready to deal with it, if you want to be a multiple, multiple Olympic coach.”
“It's important to understand when you start coaching in gymnastics, you're normally coaching young kids, so you've got to work hard to inspire them and motivate them every day. And then you get to a crossroads and they become teenagers and they go through that period of development, and that's quite a tricky time, but actually, if you get that right, that's where you really build that mutual trust and respect and actually you start listening to them and you slowly shift from leading their programme to supporting them lead their programme themselves.
"And if you can get that right, the level of respect and trust is just on another level and you can then start learning from them.
"If you open your mind and start learning from the athletes, you're going to learn so much more than anything else on that journey, and you've done it together as well, so every difficulty, every success, every experience is just that bit more special.”
“So my character is quite a driven, fiery, competitive, let's-get-it-done type character. Max is calm, cool, collected, methodical and, the pair of us together work very, very well. But for me, it's his ability to stay calm, and he's just got this innate ability to walk into an arena with 30,000 people and just not be fazed by it, and that to me is something special. So I take that from him and I get that confidence from him every time.”
“I think it's the love of the sport. There are periods in a sportsperson's life that you go through almost resenting the sport you're in because it's so hard, but then I think when you get to the level that someone like Max is at, it's that pure enjoyment of actually just doing something that you love.
"He obviously wants to get out there and perform again, he wants to experience all those things that he's experienced for years, but he genuinely loves gymnastics. And genuinely he loves training and I think that's what's brought him back to this position.”
23-26 March 2023 British Gymnastics Championships, Liverpool, England
11-16 April 2023 Artistic Gymnastics European Championships, Antalya, Turkey