Acrobatic gymnast Douglas Fordyce will look back on 2009 as the moment when his talent reached a global audience.

The 19-year-old from Honiton in Devon, has spent the year travelling the world and winning medals.

The catalyst for this success came in January, when he formed a new partnership with 17-year-old Edward Upcott and the duo started tackling the mens pair discipline.

Within nine weeks of the partnership forming, they had won the British Championships to take their place as the Senior British Mens Pair, and from that point on proved an irresistible force.

Gold medals followed at the Alberhausen Cup in Germany in April and then at the Mayor's Cup in Bulgaria a month later.

But it was July, and the World Games in Taipei, when an worldwide audience first saw the talent of the British pair.

I turned to my parents and said I really want to get involved and they actually laughed at the time Douglas Fordyce

Fordyce told BBC Spotlight they duo entered the World Games with little expectation of success.

He said: "It was an absolutely fantastic experience, we were just hoping to qualify and so to come away with the bronze medal was absolutely fantastic.

"When the scores came through and we realised that we'd got the bronze we were absolutely ecstatic, we were really, really pleased."

The duo's year got even better in October when they added to their burgeoning medal collection at the European Championships in Portugal.

Fordyce and Upcott were crowned European Champions in the dynamic category, silver medallists overall and bronze medallists in the balance category.

For Fordyce, all of the success is a world away from when he took his first tentative steps into the sport.

He said: "I must have only been about five years old, there was gymnastics on the TV and I turned to my parents and said I really want to get involved and they actually laughed at the time.

"They didn't think I'd be able to do it, so they took me down to a local group and the coaches saw I had a good talent for it.

"One of the coaches phoned my parents up and said we really want him to come and join and do it on a more serious level and my parents weren't sure if they'd actually got the right child."

Despite his parents' early misgivings, Fordyce is now at the top of his sport, and with the World Championships taking place in Poland next year he could soon become the latest athlete from Devon to be the best in the world.

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