IN her dreams at night Nellie Kim is still soaring through the air, performing the twists and flips that made her a five-time Olympic and world champion.

While 35 years have passed since the former Soviet Union gymnast’s last competitive performance – when Kim tied for gold on floor at the 1980 Olympic Games with her great rival Nadia Comaneci – her passion for the sport hasn’t waned.

The ensuing decades have seen her work as a coach and judge and she is the president of the Women’s Artistic Gymnastics Technical Committee at the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG).

That role brought her to Glasgow last week as part of a FIG delegation to assess the city’s progress with plans for hosting the World Gymnastics at the SSE Hydro this autumn.

Kim, 58, was happy to reminisce about her own time in the sport. “As a gymnast it is a fantastic feeling to be able to do something that people consider impossible,” she says. “Now I think: ‘My gosh, I was able to perform those double saltos and all those rotations in the air’.”

Her eyes sparkle with delight as she speaks. “I am still performing when I am sleeping at night,” she says. “I know in my mind what the sequences of the movements are. I still remember all of it. It will stay with me forever. My body knows it too, but physically it is not prepared.”

Kim – who has been involved in some capacity with every Olympics since 1976 – admits she never ceases to be astounded by the evolution of the sport with ever more creative and gravity-defying moves being introduced.

“The elements that gymnasts are performing today we couldn’t even have imagined in a dream when I was competing,” she says. “Every time I think: ‘this is it, we can’t go further’, we have new elements performed. It is incredible.”

A record 615 gymnasts from 91 countries are set to descend on Scotland in October. Some such as Simone Biles (USA) and Kohei Uchimura (Japan) – chasing their third and sixth consecutive world all-around titles respectively – are already iconic names, while others, such as those from debut nations Cayman Islands and Honduras, will take their first steps on this international stage.

Kim remembers what it feels like to be in both sets of shoes. Her compatriots Ludmilla Tourischeva and Olga Korbut had been the stars of the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Four years later in Montreal, Kim and Romania’s golden girl Comaneci represented the new guard.

“Gymnasts feel they have to deserve their name,” says Kim. “They must achieve high results for the public and judges to remember them. I think it was not difficult for Nadia. It also wasn’t difficult for me. In our performances we were both quite above the others. People noticed us right away.

“For some gymnasts it takes more than one competition to convince judges and the public. It is difficult to compete with a famous gymnast because the public are already on their side before the competition has even started.”

The rivalry between Kim and Comaneci – the first woman to score a perfect 10 in an Olympic gymnastics event – was fierce. While Kim lost out to Comaneci in the 1976 Olympic individual all-around final, having to settle for silver, she made history herself by posting the first 10 on vault. Kim scored another 10 to win gold on floor in the apparatus finals.

In recent years, relations between the pair have thawed. “We were never friends in the past because when we competed we didn’t even talk to each other,” says Kim. “Later, after we finished gymnastics, we had more chance to talk to each other. We enjoy each other’s company.”

The last perfect 10 in Olympic competition was in 1992 and the gymnastics code of points has since undergone several incarnations. FIG president Bruno Grandi last year called for an overhaul of the system, arguing that difficulty should take a back seat to artistry.

Grandi claimed the gymnastics he saw at the 2014 World Championships in Nanning were “too much of its acrobatic part and not too much artistry” adding: “Gymnastics is artistic gymnastics, the definition I don’t want to lose.”

It is a subject Kim feels strongly about, but equally is keen to tread carefully on. “The artistry is a very difficult topic to discuss because it is very subjective,” she says. “As a technical committee we are trying to bring everyone as close as possible to our guidelines and give them examples to follow and understand how we think the artistry should be presented.”

It is her belief that it is important to stay true to the name of the discipline – artistic gymnastics – but that beauty, power and dynamism all have a place in the sport. To that end, Kim asserts that she likes to see routines that “correspond to the personality and morphological style of a gymnast”.

“I know we will never achieve 100 per cent one opinion, but I think now we should allow artistry through excellence of performance,” she says. “The perfect technical execution is artistry.

“If you think of a beautiful painting by Raphael or Michelangelo, no-one says that is not artistic. They think: ‘Wow, it is wonderful’. No-one says is it not beautiful. Why? Their technique is excellent, their colour is excellent.

“In gymnastics, I think that through the perfect body position and fantastic aptitude in technique we can also achieve objectivity in relation to artistry.”

The 2015 World Gymnastics Championships will take place at the SSE Hydro in Glasgow from October 23 until November 1. For tickets, visit 2015worldgymnastics.com