In 1975 Olga Korbut was named Athlete of the Year and Mother of Gymnastics by the Women's Sport Foundation. An impressive title. She was 20 years old.

The careers of Olympic and Paralympic athletes are recognised in countless ways: they win medals, they awe spectators, they feature in parades, are inducted into halls of fame, and given such titles as 'parents' of their sports. Here in the offices of London 2012, we name meeting rooms after them.

It doesn't take much time before you learn to navigate your way around the office by these famous names. If you arrive a few minutes early, you read the little biographical plaque on the wall that describes their accomplishments.  I found the practice to be incredibly helpful – it puts any meeting into perspective.  It also got me curious, as I quickly discovered that there was more to most biographical blurbs than a medal count.

'Korbut' is on the other side of the office from my desk, but given that I spent my childhood as a competitive gymnast it felt like a good name to start investigating a bit further.

Olga's career was phenomenal, marked with 6 Olympic medals, along with a variety of world and Soviet championships.

She also received 20,000 pieces of fan mail from little girls around the globe in the year after she won her first Olympic medals at the 1972 Games in Munich.

20,000.

In her hometown in Belarus they had to hire a new postman to sort through her mail.

That type of fan-appeal for a gymnast was completely unheard of. What was even more phenomenal was that not all of it came from inside of the USSR – she captured the entire world in a time when the iron curtain was at its most rigid.

What got everyone so excited? Why did a 20 year-old win the title of 'Mother of Gymnastics?' I'm sure there are lots of reasons, after all she was clearly very, very good.  To me, though, the main reason for her huge fame is that she moved gymnastics  towards being a sport of acrobatics as well as grace and agility.

Prior to Olga, no woman had ever performed a back somersault on either the uneven parallel bars or the balance beam. Type her name into a video site and see what you get. It's awe inspiring.

Let me recommend a quick demonstration to see how the sport changed from there. Type Nadia Comaneci's name into the search engine of your choice. Where Olga did a straight back flip on the floor exercise, Nadia added a full twist. She did this in 1976, only four years after Munich. 

Type in 'Mary Lou Retton' and less than a decade later women have added another entire somersault – two full 360 degree flips without feet ever touching the ground – to the routine. 

Try any of the modern gymnasts names like Beth Tweddle or Yang Yilin and you'll discover that they do two flips and two twists, and they do it 2 or 3 times in the space of one routine. Jaw dropping stuff, particularly if you stop to think about how much trouble it is to do a cartwheel or a forward roll on the grass in your yard.

Here's another brief comparison. I was, at best, a pretty mediocre competitive gymnast. I was nowhere near the elite echelons of gymnastics. And yet, in the 1990s I could perform all the skills that Olympians could in the 1970s. (Though of course the execution and style left something to be desired.)  There's a good reason I ended up working in New Media and not physics: I couldn't learn to believe in gravity or I would have fallen on my head. 

I can't help but wonder how women's gymnastics  would be different if it weren’t for Olga Korbut.  I always knew she was famous, and very, very good, but it never fully realised just how much she changed the entire dynamic of the sport.  One can argue that perhaps such extreme progress isn't always a good thing, but that’s a topic for another time. 

For now, I'm happy to reminisce about my own time in the gym.  And to start thinking about which meeting room name to investigate next…