So I couldn’t let tonight go without mention. Just in case you didn’t catch it on my facebook or twitter feed, I was muchly cheered up tonight by the lads of British Gymnastics redeeming themselves from their mistake riddled performance at the World Championships Qualifying rounds.
Today they kicked some serious ass at the Olympic Test Event (the final qualifying round) and won the team competitition by almost 8 full points. The score they got today would have qualified them 4th to team finals in Tokyo. If that wasn’t enough my star of Tokyo (behind Kohei Uchimura of course), Daniel Purvis won the all-around, plus 2nd and 3rd place also went to British Gymnasts Kristian Thomas and Daniel Keatings.
All I can say is a HUGE well done. This is the first time since 1984 that Team GB will have sent a full mens AND womens team to the Olympics (and due to the Cold War the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles were boycotted by several countries who were pretty unrivalled in gymnastics).
I am soooo excited, and the fact that I’m not going to live my dream to see the competition in person when it’ll be just south of the border makes me want to cry.
Max Whitlock made his debut as a Senior at this event, and ranked 1st on Pommel horse – even ahead of his team captain, 2008 Olympic & 2011 World Bronze Medallist, Louis Smith. Go Max!
Well. We knew it was going to be an exciting competition. We had two questions: Would Kohei Uchimura get his 3rd All Around medal to maintain his domination of Men’s gymnastics this quadrennium? And who would take Silver & Bronze?
The answer to the first question was a resounding YES.
Today, in front of a home crowd, we watched the best gymnast the world has ever seen prove just why he is exactly that. Kohei Uchimura truly showed us he is a top class champion. He dominated from the start, and even holding back on some difficulty he didn’t score below 15 all day. I would actually argue that he was underscored in a couple of rotations (particularly floor where they took away 0.9 marks for a basically flawless routine). His ending score? 93.361 He finished 3 points ahead of the silver medallist. Unbelievable. His ending high bar routine brought on a standing ovation from everyone in the arena, the applause was almost deafening and in the stands, people applauded his mother who turned and took a bow. Yes Mrs Uchimura – you did a terrific job!
It seemed like Silver was destined for Uchimura’s teammate, Koji Yamamuro. He performed consistently throughout the competition. And following in the Japanese footsteps meeting that consistency was the stalwart of British Gymnastics: Daniel Purvis. He’d lead off the first group on floor, and for the first two rotations was placing 2nd in the top group. The 2 Americans had qualifed in front of him at the weekend, but where they made mistakes Dan made none, hitting routine after routine.
After vault it became the question: who would take the Bronze? Would it be Dan Purvis bringing a medal home to Great Britain, or Philipp Boy bringing one home to Germany. We knew after Vault, Philipp had 2 strong events, where as Daniel had 2 of his weaker events. On the other hand, Philipp had not had a good week in competition suffering plenty of costly mistakes as had a few of the other German team members. We watched the gymnasts in the top group go up on the Parallel bars one by one…
Orozco (USA) had a fantastic routine bringing him back up the scoreboard. Yamamuro made some small errors. Uchimura was stunning as per usual. Philipp went up, and a couple of mistakes, and was scored very harshly. In fact, too harshly on my opinion. He was shocked at his score. And so was I. At the same time, I knew that if Dan could hit his routine, he could get a much higher score on PB to keep himself in medal contention. And he did. 15.200.
It was time for the last event. Philipp Boy knew he had to have the routine of his life…and he did. Scoring a whopping 16.066. He was elated as he stuck his landing. Dan followed with a great routine for him and scored much higher than he had done in qualifers (14.800), but it was not enough to stay ahead of Boy. Yamamuro went up choosing a less difficult routine with the hope of better execution score. He only scored 14.866, which put him behind Boy. We knew then who had one – even with a fall, Uchimura had won. And even more surprisingly, Philipp Boy had pulled off an incredible comeback to not just get the Bronze, but the SILVER medal.
Uchimura could have done half a routine and got the Gold, but he did not disappoint. Throwing several ‘Kovacs’ and other difficult moves he finished off in style.
And so it ended… Uchimura 1st, Boy 2nd, Yamamuro 3rd, Britain’s Dan Purvis in 4th and John Orozco in 5th.
But you know the best part – the great sportsmanship between the gymnasts in that top group. Throughout the competition you saw them clapping each other, shaking hands as one came off the podium and another went on, smiling and talking as they stood to get their medals. Yes, they are competitors, but they are gracious too. And that is something to be commended.
Tomorrow, it’s an early start as we have Day 1 of Apparatus Finals…Men’s Floor, Women’s Vault, Men’s Pommel Horse, Women’s Uneven Bars and Men’s Still Rings.
Well, there were more surprises today. Great Britain expected to qualify easily. Not so much. It was a horrible day for the British men’s team, and they didn’t make team finals. There was a little bit of hope though – Louis Smith made Pommel Horse finals, and despite lots of struggles & mistakes his teammates made, Daniel Purvis kept his cool and made all his routines…and into the All Around final. But yeah, I was glad not to be watching today. China also had some ‘eek’ moments today, and the current world champions only qualified 3rd – this was unexpected.
Here are the rankings after Qualifers. In brackets at the top of each category are the current World Medallists for each event.
Team Finals (G: China S: Japan B: Germany)
1. Japan
2. USA
3. China
4. Germany
5. Russia
6. Korea
7. Romania
8. Ukraine
Ranks 9-16 will go onto the test event in London next year to compete for the last 4 spots in the Olympics. These teams in order of ranking are: France, Great Britain, Spain, Canada, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Italy & Belarus
3. Fabian Hambüchen GER (Olympic Bronze Medallist in this event)
4. John Orozco USA
5. Philipp Boy GER
6. Kai Sou CHN (Olympic Gold medallist in this event)
7. Epke Zonderland NED
8. Chenglong Zhang CHN
Individual All-Around (G: Kohei Uchimura JPN; S: Philipp Boy GER; B: Jonathan Horton USA – DNQ)
The following gymnasts ranked ahead of some of the gymnasts in the All-Around Final, but will not be allowed to compete in the final because of the 2-per-country rule: Jonathan Horton USA (5th), Fabian Hambüchen GER (19th), Steven Legendre USA (24th)
Group 1:
1. Kohei Uchimura JPN 2. John Orozco USA 3. Danell Leyva USA 4. Koji Yamamuro JPN 5. Daniel Purvis GBR 6. Philipp Boy GER
Group 2:
7. E Garibov RUS 8. Mykola Kuksenkov UKR 9. Marcel Nguyen GER 10. Rafael Martinez ESP 11. Cyril Tommasone FRA 12. Luis Rivera PUR
Group 3:
13. Flavius Koczi ROU 14. Anton Fokin UZB 15. David Belyavskiy RUS 16. Seungil Kim KOR 17. Haibin Teng CHN 18. Soo Myun Kim KOR
Group 4:
19. Marian Dragulescu ROU 20. Alexander Shatilov ISR 21. Tomas Gonzalez CHI 22. Oleg Stepko UKR 23. Andrey Likhovitskiy BLR 24. Pascal Bucher SUI
There was a little bit of hope though – Louis Smith made Pommel Horse finals, and despite lots of struggles & mistakes his teammates made, Daniel Purvis kept his cool and made all his routines…and into the All Around final. But yeah, I was glad not to be watching today. China also had some ‘eek’ moments today, and the current world champions only qualified 3rd – this was unexpected.
