Before the curtain came down on the Montreal Worlds Sunday, the second day of apparatus finals saw four new World champions emerge for the first time: Pauline Schaefer (GER) on Balance Beam, Zou Jingyuan (CHN) on Parallel Bars, Mai Murakami (JPN) on Floor and Tin Srbic (CRO) on Horizontal Bar. Kenzo Shirai (JPN), the first-time […]
via FIVE NEW CHAMPIONS AS MONTREAL WORLDS DRAW TO A CLOSE — newfanzoneblog
None of the five reigning World champions relinquished their titles on the first day of apparatus finals in the Montreal Olympic Stadium: Whether it was for Men’s Floor, Women’s Vault, Pommel Horse, Uneven Bars or Still Rings, every gold went to a gymnast who stood atop the World podium in 2015. Kenzo the king on […]
via 2017 ARTISTIC WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS: 5 WORLD CHAMPIONS GOLDEN AGAIN IN EVENT FINALS — newfanzoneblog
Unprecedented: A 4-way tie for gold on Uneven Bars
It was an Uneven Bars final worth its weight in gold: For the first time in the history of the sport, four gymnasts — China’s Fan Yilin, Russians Viktoria Komova and Daria Spiridonova and American Madison Kocian — tied for the World title. Each of the four scored 15.366, setting the SSE Hydro crowd buzzing and tripling the duration of the awards ceremony.
Fan, Komova, Spiridonova and Kocian will forever be linked in the annals of Women’s Gymnastics, which has never seen anything like this. Ties for gold at Worlds have been more frequent in Men’s Gymnastics, including three-way splits on Pommel Horse in 1903 and 1992, and on High Bar in 1922. Five gymnasts tied for silver on Parallel Bars in 1922.
The first king of Britain
Since Beth Tweddle became the British women’s first World champion in 2006, the British men have been waiting for the gymnast who would win them a world crown as well. It came to an end Saturday as Max Whitlock spun his way to the Pommel Horse title, besting teammate Louis Smith by a mere tenth of the point. The two 2012 Olympic Pommel Horse medallists thus combined to produce their country’s best ever result in Gymnastics: British gymnasts on the first and second steps of the podium.
If anything helped Whitlock and Smith on Pommel Horse, it was the absence of reigning World and Olympic champion Krisztian Berki of Hungary, who did not qualify for the medal round. With a gold, three silvers and a bronze already in their pockets, Glasgow 2015 has is already Great Britain’s most successful World Championships. It’s not over yet, either: The British will have three more chances to medal tomorrow on the second day of finals.
Russia returns to the top
After failing to earn medals in team finals and the All-around competition, 2012 Olympic Vault bronze medallist Maria Paseka revived the Russian women with gold on Vault, her country’s first on the event since 2002. Paseka also deprived 2008 Olympic Vault champion Hong Un Jong of a second consecutive World title: the two competed the same vaults, though Paseka’s superior execution made the difference. Minutes later, during the incredible Uneven Bars final, Komova and Spiridonova earned Russia another two golds.
The rebound of Mr. Twist
Even in the absence of Kohei Uchimura, the Japanese hit parade continued Saturday, with twisting sensation Kenzo Shirai regaining the World Floor title he won in 2013. As Shirai slayed the audience and judges by nailing his quadruple twist final pass to win his second gold of this championships, Great Britain’s Max Whitlock was no less happy in silver, while Spain’s Rayderley Zapata won bronze.
In the name of the father
Greece’s Eleftherios Petrounias came to the World Championships with one mission: win a medal on Rings to honor his father, who recently passed away. By relegating China’s You Hao and 2014 World champion Liu Yang silver and bronze, respectively, Petrounias delivered a fitting memorial.
One more for Biles
Already golden in the team and All-around finals, American Simone Biles gave herself one more reason to smile, adding the bronze on Vault to her growing medal collection. The medal is Biles’s 12th at a World Championships, breaking the American record she set earlier this week.
Olympic qualifiers
Medallists from individual apparatus event finals in Glasgow advance directly to the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, provided their teams do not qualify. Ergo, Eleftherios Petrounias (GRE, gold on Still Rings), Hong Un Jong (PRK, silver on Women’s Vault) and Harutyun Merdinyan (ARM, bronze on Pommel Horse), all gymnasts whose teams did not compete at this World Championships, have qualified as individuals to next summer’s Olympics.
Rayderley Zapata (ESP, bronze on Men’s Floor) can also sleep easily, knowing that his place at the Games is secure as well, even if the Spanish men don’t qualify a team to Rio at April’s Olympic Test Event
Uchimura leads Japan on its day of glory
After silver at four straight World Championships — including a 0.1 heartbreaker last year in Nanning — the Japanese men finally reversed their fortunes to take gold Wednesday night in Glasgow.
Team gold for the first time since 1978 is the realisation of a dream for star Kohei Uchimura, who contributed heavily to his team’s victory, scoring 91.531 of Japan’s 270.818 points. The gymnast many believe is the best who ever lived has already won the past five consecutive World All-around titles in his own right but said before the competition that he would rather win gold with his team than a sixth consecutive individual title. The heavy favorite for Friday’s Men’s All-around final, he may well get to have both.
The anticipated Japan-China team showdown never materialized. Guided by master twister Kenzo Shirai, who slayed the competition on Floor with his quadruple twist, Japan distanced themselves by 2.7 points from the beginning and had extended their lead to 6.3 over China by the halfway point of the competition.
But falls from Yusuke Tanaka and Uchimura on the High Bar in the final rotation brought the team brutally back down to earth. By a margin of less than half a point, they held on following a late charge from Great Britain, which finished their competition on a high note on Floor before an adoring public.
“I would have liked to have had a perfect competition, so I feel bad about my fall on High Bar,” said Uchimura. “As the last competitor, I wanted to perfect all the way through.”
Still, after nearly four decades of waiting for a World title, Uchimura, Tanaka, Ryohei Kato, Kazuma Kaya, Kenzo Shirai and Naoto Hayasaka are guaranteed to return to Japan as heroes of the archipelago. If nothing else, they have made their mothers, who watched the competition waving Japanese flags from the stands, very proud.
Great Britain tumbles to new heights
Three years after their historic Olympic bronze in London, the British men’s team remained steady to finish on the podium for the first time ever at a World Championships, less than half a point behind Japan to boot. Inspired by the British women’s bronze a day ago, Louis Smith, Daniel Purvis, Kristian Thomas, Max Whitlock, Nile Wilson and Brinn Bevan took care to write a new chapter in British Gymnastics history themselves with their silver. For some team members, Glasgow 2015 had shades of London 2012: “We looked at the scoreboard and we didn’t know what color medal we would have,” Smith recounted. Competitions at home obviously agree with them.
China’s fall from grace
For the Chinese, 12 years of domination at the World level came to an end Wednesday night. From the beginning, Lin Chaopan, Deng Shudi, Zhang Chenglong, Xiao Ruoteng, Liu Yang and You Hao looked less precise than usual. China never held the lead, getting lost in the classification early before rebounding to take bronze on the strength of strong performances on Parallel Bars and High Bar. To challenge for the title, however, it was too little, too late. Less than a year before the Rio Olympics, the Chinese have accomplished little other than signalling to the rest of the world that their Olympic title is by no means assured. “China has a great history in gymnastics. For us, this is a warning,” said Zhang Chenglong. “We didn’t win this year, but we know that we are still one of the strongest nations.”
Russia off the podium again
Lost in the crowd in qualification, the Russian team of Nikita Nagornyy, Ivan Stretovich, Denis Ablyazin, Nikolai Kuksenkov and David Belyavskiy did not let themselves be forgotten in the final. After a quiet beginning on Pommel Horse and Rings, the team took off during the second half of the competition with exceptional performances on Vault and Parallel Bars. But they could not seal the deal on Floor Exercise, and like the Russian women the night before, watched the medal ceremony without taking part.
The United States had a dream
If the anticipated battle between Japan and China never quite got off the ground, the U.S. men happily stepped into the role of potential spoilers to Japan, if only for a moment. Paul Ruggeri, Donnell Whittenburg, Danell Leyva, Chris Brooks, Brandon Wynn and Alex Naddour trailed the Japanese by a mere 0.1 with two events to go. Unfortunately for the Americans, one of those events was their nemesis Pommel Horse. With a weak average of just over 14 points per gymnast, they too dropped out of the podium race to fifth overall.
King Kohei
In Men’s Artistic Gymnastics, he’s the man: Since winning his first World All-around title in London in 2009, Kohei Uchimura has added another golden chapter to his stellar career with every passing year. With five consecutive World titles and the Olympic gold in 2012, Uchimura holds the record for All-around victories at the World Championships. Though his brilliance has brought him five Olympic medals (one gold and four silver) and 16 World medals (seven gold and five silver among them), the 26-year-old from Japan strives for one thing only: perfection.
Imperial China
For more than two decades, one nation has almost singlehandedly dominated the Men’s team competition at the World Championships. Since Dortmund in 1994, the Chinese men have won 10 of 11 World team titles, in addition to three of the five Olympic titles up for grabs along the way. For the past eight years, the team competition has been a ferocious battle between China, which deploys a solid legion of event specialists, and Japan, led by its star Kohei Uchimura. The competition is so tight that of the 273 points earned by both teams last year in Nanning, the gold medal was decided by one tenth of a point!
A Dutchman in flight
In a sport filled with daredevils, Epke Zonderland (NED) does combinations on High Bar even the most envelope-pushing gymnasts only dream of. The 29-year-old’s ability to do consecutive flipping release skills — letting go of the bar, flipping and twisting over it, regrabbing it and letting go again immediately to do still more flips and twists — has catapulted him to Olympic gold, two World titles and immeasurable Youtube stardom. Video footage of his winning Horizontal Bar routine in London in 2012 has received more than 1.8 million views to date, and earned him the nickname “The Flying Dutchman.”
The incredible Japanese twisting sensation
An adolescent upstart with an aptitude for twisting like a top, Kenzo Shirai’s prodigious talent first led him to become the youngest man ever to make the Japanese National team, and in 2013, one of the youngest-ever World champions on Floor. Shirai has two signature skills on Floor — a triple twisting forward somersault and a quadruple twisting back somersault, which he performs at the end of his routine — as well as a triple-twisting Vault, all of which are named after him. This year he plans to unveil a new tumbling run, which he hopes will help him regain the World Floor title.
Man of the year
2015 has been a golden year for Oleg Verniaiev: Since last November, the determined Ukrainian has won every competition he’s entered, racking up All-around titles at the European Championships, European Games, World University Games and American Cup, the last of which earned him the FIG World Cup series title for the second consecutive year. While Verniaiev is considered Uchimura’s most serious rival, the two have yet to meet in competition in 2015. The last time the two competed in the same arena was in 2014 in Nanning, where Verniaiev finished fourth All-around. Uchimura, of course, won the gold.
Great Britain awaits its first king
Beth Tweddle was the pioneer on the women’s side, but no British man has yet won a World title in Men’s Gymnastics. Nevertheless, before and since the London Olympic Games, the sport has experienced unprecedented growth and popularity on the island. During the London Games, Louis Smith (silver on Pommel Horse), Max Whitlock (bronze on Pommel Horse), Kristian Thomas, Daniel Purvis and Sam Oldham made history by taking bronze in the team competition. Those first four, aided by Nile Wilson and Brinn Bevan this year, hope to do as well in Glasgow, the first stop on the road to Rio.
38 gold medals
With the exception of Jake Dalton (USA), all medallists from the 2014 Worlds in Nanning are expected to compete in Glasgow. Additionally, no fewer than 15 former World champions will be present, including Marian Dragulescu (ROU/9 World medals), Kohei Uchimura (JPN/7), Zhang Chenglong (CHN/4), Krisztian Berki (HUN/3), Epke Zonderland (NED/2), Diego Hypolito (BRA/2), Lin Chaopan (CHN/2), Liu Yang (CHN/2), Yuri Van Gelder (NED/1), Arthur Zanetti (BRA/1), Oleg Verniaiev (UKR/1), Kenzo Shirai (JPN/1), Danell Leyva (USA/1), Fabian Hambüchen (GER/1), Vlasios Maras (GRE/1).
Lords of the Rings
Five Olympic gold medallists from London 2012 will also be present in Glasgow to continue the grand adventure that all hope will lead them to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. These are Kohei Uchimura (JPN/All-around), Epke Zonderland (NED/Horizontal Bar), Arthur Zanetti (BRA/Still Rings), Krisztian Berki (HUN/Pommel Horse) and Zhang Chenglong (CHN/Team competition).
newfanzone 