Gymnast Giarnni Regini-Moran doubts 2022 will ever be beaten after a year to remember.

There were medals - eight of them - across three major championships but that doesn’t tell half the story.

In November, he made history as the first British man to win World Championship gold on floor.

Not that he realised at the time, assuming decorated team-mate Max Whitlock had already achieved the feat.

His haul also included team gold at the Commonwealth Games and European Championships, and a treasured team bronze at the Worlds.

It’s the memories, as well as the medals, that have made 2022 extra special for the 24-year-old, who lives in Dartford after moving from Gravesend and is a member of Maidstone-based Pegasus Gymnastics Club.

How many people can say they’ve had happy birthday sung to them by the crowd at their home Commonwealth Games, followed by a chat with William and Kate, then the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge?

“I don’t think anything will top this year,” said Regini-Moran, who joined Pegasus towards the end of last year.

“I’m still trying to process what’s happened this year. It’s definitely a year to remember.

“Not just in terms of results, but being in the moment, living in the moment.

“Birmingham, for the Commonwealth Games, was by far the best for that, soaking up every minute.

“On my birthday I made two finals, winning two silver medals, I then met Prince William and Kate and had the crowd singing happy birthday.

“I honestly felt nothing can top this, ever. That all happened in one day. It was insane. Absolutely mad.”

After European glory in Munich, the World Championships were back on home soil. It was off to Liverpool, where Regini-Moran helped Great Britain land bronze behind big favourites China and Japan, clinching team qualification for the 2024 Paris Olympics.There was also the small matter of a world title on floor.

“The gold medal was a dream come true,” he said. “To become world champion, there’s no higher status than that.

“Olympic champion, that’s brilliant, but we always say the World Championships is the hardest competition because there’s more countries and people who can compete.

“At the Olympics, only a certain number of countries can qualify and sometimes you don’t have all the best gymnasts because they’ve not qualified a team or they’ve not qualified individually.

“For us, we always say World Championships is the biggest and hardest competition that we do.

“The team medal probably meant even more because because we’d gone from last place after three rotations and we’d slowly crept our way up.

“It was basically our high bar against Italy’s pommel for the bronze and that feeling of being with my team, being with the boys, we’d worked so hard for that moment.

“I honestly say that’s the better feeling than winning the gold, doing it together, being with your team-mates through thick and thin.”

Regini-Moran’s history-making floor routine arguably made more headlines - but it was news to him. His score of 14.533 saw him pip Olympic all-around champion Daiki Hashimoto by 0.033.

“I had no idea I was the first British man to win gold on floor,” he said.

“I genuinely thought Max Whitlock had done it. He was Olympic champion on floor in 2016 but not world champion. I didn’t know any of this.

“When I go to a competition, I don’t think about results too much because it’s more down to your performance.

“If I do a good performance, I’ll get a good score and if I get a good score, I’ll get a good result.

“When I saw the highest score, I was thinking I could do this.

“It was almost like I’ve been given an opportunity here and I need to take it because so far some of the best floor workers have made mistakes.

“The way it was going, I was like I just need to land on my feet and stay calm and that’s what I did.

“You only learn to do that through time because the old me, a few years ago, would have been very jittery, very nervous, very anxious, and I would have ended up making a mistake.

“You put that pressure on yourself because of course you want to do well at a major competition.

“As soon as I took that away, which I did this year, I’ve started to see the results, just by enjoying the competition and enjoying the moment.

“It’s crazy how it works but you have to go through these things to learn. You’re constantly learning. You make a mistake and it’s, ‘OK, that didn’t work, I need to change it’.

“I’ve learned so much these past few years. For example, I believe we all peaked too early for the Tokyo Olympics.

“We were absolutely flying before we left, we were looking unbelievable, but then we got out there with two weeks to go and hit a wall.

“That was the thing this year. It was how do we manage it because we’ve got three majors in a very short space of time.

“How are we going to make sure we maintain good physical fitness and stay healthy and hit our best performances at the same time?

“I feel like everything for the past few years has been about learning and getting me to this point. Everything this year had just clicked and fallen into place.”

With team qualification assured for Paris, next year should be slightly less manic for Regini-Moran and his team-mates.

It could mean a chance for the next generation to compete in April’s European Championships in Turkey, although he has an eye on the World Championships in Belgium, held over September and October.

“We’ve got our place in Paris and that was the biggest goal,” said Regini-Moran.

“We can’t take our foot off the gas but we can almost give ourselves the break we need after how heavy this year was.

“We want to go into Paris feeling ready, feeling strong. We don’t want to go into 2024 feeling fatigued, like we’ve done too much, that we’re a bit overworked.

“That might give younger ones an opportunity to go to the Europeans and have a go.

“Worlds? We’ll see. I’ve got a title I want to try and keep and hopefully I can do that.

“But for the first part of the year it’ll be about taking it slow, thinking how can we make those extra marks up on China and Japan.

“They’re absolutely flying and we don’t know if Russia, who are also very successful in gymnastics, will be allowed to compete yet.”

Regini-Moran has overcome a catalogue of injuries to reach the point in his career, the most serious of which saw him shatter his knee in a training fall in 2016.

Even before joining Pegasus, he’d just been through two lots of shoulder surgery and an ankle operation.

“We’re high-level gymnasts and we put our body through so much stress,” said Regini-Moran.

“When most people are walking on their legs, we’re normally on our hands, upside down or hanging from a bar.

“A lot of stress goes through the shoulders and that’s something I’ll have to deal with continuously until my career finishes. I’m used to that now.

“I’m used to people wanting to talk about my injuries, I’m used to the way my body feels now.

“I understand it’s part of sport, especially when you do quite an intense and dangerous sport, that injuries are bound to happen.

“I look at them in positive ways because they’ve taught me a lot of lessons and will continue to do so.

“I try and turn the negative things into positives and see how I can learn from them to adapt my programme.

“Those things will always be in the back of my mind but I don’t let them control me.”