Three-time Olympic gymnastics champion Max Whitlock is planning to come out of retirement for the LA Olympic Games in 2028, the Team GB great has announced.

Whitlock, whose six Olympic medals include men’s pommel horse gold at Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, had announced before Paris 2024 that he would retire from the sport. However, after he slipped off the horse — and therefore the podium — in the French capital, he said he has “unfinished business.”

He told the Times in an interview released on Monday: “I was sitting in the station with my family in a café for a little bit [immediately after coming home from Paris] and I said to them, ‘I’m not done, I can’t finish it like that. It was the raw emotion of getting back to the UK and just feeling like I can’t end it like that.”

“Something just didn’t feel right. Unfinished is the exact word. My career’s just not complete. It was just really gnawing away at me.

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“I thought, ‘It’s the right time for me to retire but it’s not the right way.’ And that’s something that spooks me if I’m really honest because I was pushing it a bit going into Paris in terms of my age. So you can imagine how much I’m pushing it now. It’s a massive challenge.”

Whitlock will be 39 years old by the time the LA Games roll around.

“That’s a curveball,” he said. “Plan A would not be to be at an Olympics aged 39. Plan A is to get to LA and finish it the way I want to finish it and I’m definitely not thinking beyond that.”