Angela Merkel: I Wish I'd Been a Gymnast

People in power often admit to dreaming of what they will do when they leave office. Some dream of making millions with memoirs and speech tours, while others may just want to enjoy a lie-in. But Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, has an altogether more ambitious dream - mastering the balance beam.

In an interview with a woman's magazine Merkel said she wished she could be a gymnast and conquer the art of turning and leaping on the beam, the 1.25m-high apparatus used in women's gymnastics and which requires a great deal of elegance, endurance and precision.

"I wish I could do gymnastics on the balance beam," she told Frau im Spiegel, adding that she would also like to brush up her French and study law. But before her critics were able to weigh in and question Merkel's suitability for gymnastics - her sporting prowess, by her own admission, stretches just to walking, cross-country skiing and gardening - she added: "I have long ago come to terms with the fact that it is not my forte."

Merkel, 54, who was voted the most powerful woman in the world for the second time by Forbes magazine last month, has admitted in the past that she was often terrified of sports lessons, especially jumping and gymnastics. She said sport and handicrafts had never been her strengths, and she had been reliant on patient sports teachers to motivate her "rather than the ones who stand at the sidelines waiting to see you bodge it up yet again".

Merkel's remarks were made on the sidelines of an extensive tour of Germany's schools as part of her campaign to put education at the top of her government's political agenda under the slogan "no education, no prosperity". The trained physicist who gave up science for politics nearly 20 years ago, said that physics had given her the ability to "distinguish between what is important and what is not, and to work very precisely".