Yorkshire gymnastics clubs will spearhead Britain’s largest ever team at the sport's biggest celebration on the planet in Amsterdam later this month.

Leeds Gymnastics Club, Halifax’s Diamonds Gymnastics Club, Honley’s Pennine Gymnastics Club and Goole Gymnastics will join forces to represent Britain at the World Gymnaestrada at the end of this month.

They will come together with over 20,000 participants from 50 other nations to create a spectacular festival of gymnastics. 

Diamonds GC will be sending 12 gymnastics to the Dutch showpiece, which gets underway on July 30.

And Jayne Passey, coach and welfare officer at the club, said: “We have done it before and the last we went to was in Austria.

“Some of the gymnasts going to Amsterdam have been before. It’s nice to know that gymnasts have enjoyed it so much that they think four years in advance about going again.

“We’ve been doing lots of rehearsals, we’ve been to Liverpool and Nottingham to meet up with other British Gymnastics gymnasts who are going.

“We’ve been practicing our own sections, but then we all go together at the event. Everybody is just so excited about it.”

Honley lead coach Elle Stokes, 23, said: “It’s so exciting for them. They’re not competitive gymnasts, they’ve never done any big trips through gymnastics like this before.

“We’re really excited that Gymnaestrada gives us the opportunity to go in a non-competitive way and put our display on.

“When we started up our display team, we just started researching all the different events that we could participate in, and this just seemed to be the biggest and most exciting one we could find.

“We’ve done lots of research into what it’s all about, watched videos of previous years, but we’re really excited to see what it’s actually like when we’re there. We’re hoping it’s a really amazing week for the gymnasts.”

First staged in 1953, the World Gymnaestrada is a non-competitive and inclusive event held every four years that celebrates the joy of the sport. 

The event is open to everybody, regardless of gender, age, race, religion, culture, or ability or disability between 30 July – 5 August.  

Gymnasts will also have the chance to see performances from other countries and the best of the best in the FIG Gala, as well as the World Gymnaestrada opening and closing ceremonies. 

Jess Nicholson, head of gymnastics at Leeds GC, said: “We pretty much build our display team around attending Gymnaestrada every four years.

“Everything we do in the four years building up to it is basically us trying to peak for the event, be the best we can be and have the best routine we can for that time. It’s a long-term thing, it’s something we committed to a long time ago in terms of timescales.

“We’ve got a bunch of kids, some of whom have been to international festivals before and some who have never been to any at all. We have quite a big age range and in our team across the last few weeks, they’ve started to get excited that it’s actually getting close.”

British Gymnastics will be bringing the joy and celebration of the World Gymnaestrada experience to life across its digital channels throughout the event, and you can read more about the new vision for gymnastics in the UK to deliver an uplifting experience for all at www.british-gymnastics.org/vision.