Three decades on, Olga Korbut is still working to make the world beautiful

Early-morning shoppers have been milling around centre stage at Metro City Plaza for about half an hour. There's no doubt the rain tumbling down has driven some of them to shelter, but the cameras most are carrying give the game away - they are here to see someone pretty special. Above the stage there are posters of a beaming blonde girl, an Olympic gold medal around her neck in one, while another shows her in full flight - a picture of almost complete athletic perfection.

That was Olga Korbut at 17, the darling of the then Soviet Union as she ignited the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, winning gold on the balance beam, and the floor, gold in the team event and silver on the uneven bars.

And still, 36 years after Munich, the cameras are capturing Korbut's every move as she first takes a group of kindergarten kids through a series of warm-ups.

This is Olga Korbut at 53, in Hong Kong to help promote this August's Beijing Olympics and still very much in love with the sport that took her to fame, and very comfortable with all the attention that still surrounds her.

When we are taken to the centre stage for a chat, there are spotlights shedding blinding light from two separate angles and an assistant says she'll turn them off to make things more comfortable. But Korbut is unconcerned. For her, there has been no escaping the spotlight, not since she first took up gymnastics as an eight-year-old in her native Belarus.

'You know what, I was born a gymnast,'' she says. 'Nobody pushed me. I just got it. What I loved, and still love, is that this is beautiful.'