CARLOS YULO finished seventh in his pet floor exercise at the Liverpool World Artistic Gymnastics Championships on Sunday, no thanks to a slip early in his routine.
Yulo, the floor gold medalist in 2019 in Stuttgart, slipped after his first jump at the M&S Bank Arena, drawing a loud “oohhh” from the spectators that showed indications they rooted for the Filipino Tokyo Olympian.
Yulo was unperturbed the rest of his routine and drew 13.300 points, enough to avoid finishing last in the eight-gymnast event that Britain’s Giarnni Regini-Moran ruled with 14.533 points.
Men’s all-round champion Daiki Hashimoto (14.500) clinched silver and Ryosuke Doi (14.266) bagged bronze for a 2-3 Japanese finish.
“The entire coliseum was shocked when Caloy slipped,” Gymnastics Association of the Philippines President Cynthia Carrion-Norton told BusinessMirror Sunday. “The whole coliseum expected him to win and be the gold medalist. So when he fell, the crowd shouted ‘oohhh.’”
“I wanted to cry,” Carrion-Norton added.
The 22-year-old Yulo—who was eighth in the all-around Saturday, an improvement from his 10th-place finish in Stuttgart—still have the vault gold medal to defend and the parallel bars silver to improve on Monday.
“told him that there are some things that are really not meant to be. So we have to move on because there are still two more finals events to be contested,” Carrion-Norton said “I encouraged him not to be disappointed but I feel he’s okay already and ready to bounce back.”
France’s Benjamin Osberger (14.233) finished fourth, Italy’s Nicola Bartoloni (14.233) was fifth, South Korea’s Sunghyun Ryu (14.200) was sixth and Kazakhstan’s Milad Karimi (12.100) was eighth.
Image credits: AP