Watch Louis Smith prepare for a gold in 2012

You can find British Olympians in the most obscure places. It is only by twisting through a housing estate just off the B1514 to Chatteris that you stumble across the Huntingdon Olympic Gymnastics Club, home of Louis Smith.

What is bizarre is not the location, the poky facilities or even the smell (stale sweat?), but the sight of world-class gymnasts at one end of the hall and a dozen toddlers at the other.

To help to fund the building, Paul Hall, Smith's coach, runs a sideline in toddlers' mornings and special needs classes, so as world-class gymnasts leap, swing and somersault, mums fight to stop their little ones tripping over springboards or plunging into the special foam landing pits.

“If we can produce an Olympic bronze medal in a gym like this,” Smith, eyes rolling, says, “imagine what we could do with proper, dedicated facilities. I'm sure it's not like this for the Chinese.” The training venue makes it all the more remarkable that a young, black kid from Cambridgeshire came to stand on the Olympic podium in Beijing this summer with a bronze medal in the pommel horse. Smith became the first British man to win an individual gymnastics medal for 100 years and was the sport's first black male Olympic medal-winner.

“Someone told me that the other day and it felt great, to be honest,” he said. Proud of his Caribbean roots, Smith has considered competing with a giant Afro haircut although he fears that, in a sport where appearances matter, “they'll think I'm taking the mick”.

It is this showman side of Smith's personality that keeps bursting through during the interview, from his revelation that he applied for an audition on The X Factor - and evidently sees his career in gymnastics as a tragic loss for the world of pop - to his look of bafflement when asked if he employs a sports psychologist.

“I don't really need one,” he said. “I love performing, I love going out on to the stage. Standing there in front of 20,000 people, everyone's eyes fixed on you, it's a feeling you can't really explain.”

Smith was already known for his willingness to attempt the riskiest manoeuvres in the pommel, an event that is a legacy of the days when knights in armour had to practise mounting a horse. Sounding like the characters in Blades of Glory, the comic movie, where two ice dancers attempt the mythical Iron Lotus routine despite risk of decapitation, Smith says he is planning some moves that have never been seen before.

“Not by anyone,” he said. “It's not an official element, it's my own skill, just trying to get a bit of the X factor on pommel horse, to stand me out from the rest of the competitors. I don't want to tell you or anyone else. I want to keep it secret. But you'll know it when you see it.”

If this all makes Smith sound a little cocky, he is, but only in the bright, engaging way you would hope for from a hip 19-year-old. He is a regular enough guy to have got a thrill from munching free McDonald's food in the athletes' village in Beijing. “You'd just take your stuff and walk away,” he said. “It felt like stealing.” On his return from China, he went on holiday with friends - to a caravan in Great Yarmouth. He even took his medal. “Some of my mates hadn't seen it on the telly,” he said. “We had to stash it away in a cupboard when we were out in case the caravan got broken into.”

Smith aspires to a fast car and a big house, but the most he can expect for now is an increase in funding to the £25,000 top grade through the National Lottery and UK Sport and perhaps the same again in sponsorship. Agents are queueing up with promises of riches but, for now, his modest means require him to live at home with his mum, Elaine, near Peterborough.

Smith is still in touch with his Jamaican dad, but it was his mum who raised him since he was a toddler, ferrying him to training. The Huntingdon sports hall has been his second home since he was a hyperactive five-year-old sent there to burn off energy.

He tried football, basketball, the choir and ballet, but it was at gymnastics that he quickly began to excel. How did the new passion go down with his friends? “Well, it's like when you are on a bouncy castle and everyone wants to do front flips and back flips. That's gymnastics. My mates were like, ‘Wow, that's cool, teach me that.' And I'm like, ‘Well come down the gym.'” His biggest problem was a short attention span, although it may also have been the making of him. “Paul [his coach since childhood] would be teaching and I'd be messing around, pushing someone over or not listening, and he used to say, ‘[do] 200 circles [on a pommel trainer]'. I was constantly doing circles as my punishment.” Which helps to explain how he came to be in Beijing.

Bronze at the World Championships in Stuttgart in 2007 showed that Smith was capable of competing in China but it still came as a surprise when, pulling off the most difficult routine, he made the podium. Now expectations are rampant.

“Everyone keeps coming up to me saying, ‘Gold next time, Louis.' And I'm like, ‘Aaargh, now I've got to deliver.' If I don't, they're going to be thinking, ‘What's he been doing in the gym the last four years? He's been messing around, not working.'” Although he regards himself as capable of competing across the six events (floor, pommel, rings, vault, parallel bars, high bar), his size, a rippling 5ft 9in, puts him at the top of the weight scale for gymnasts.

The advantage he does possess for the pommel is unusually long arms (his wingspan, atypically, is two inches greater than his height). “And being tall, I can look elegant,” he said. “Well, elegant-ish.” It is a long road to London given the physical toll. “Four years? My body is shouting at me, telling me it is such a long time. It's just killing me. My doctor has told me I've got a 30-year-old's back and I can't stand up for more than half an hour. I am walking round on my hands [on the pommel], which humans aren't supposed to do.”

Next week, at a grand prix in Glasgow, it is back to competition. Smith has been so busy post-Beijing that he has not had a chance to design a new celebratory tattoo, although he says that it will figure Nike - not the brand but the Greek goddess of victory, whose image is engraved on every Olympic medal.

“I need to think of some words, something about goals and journeys,” he said. “Something that means something to me. I'm proud if I'm a role model, because you don't see many black people out there strutting their stuff in gymnastics.”