Relaxed gymnasts too strong to beat

GUANGZHOU - China's male gymnasts put on a relaxed showing, nearly reducing their event to a training exercise.

Related readings:  Chinese lifter breaks two world records at Asiad  China win women's 100m freestyle relay at Asiad  China's Huang wins men's kayak single at Asiad  China sweeps 10th Asiad gymnastics men's team gold

Their performance suggested the only opponent China has is itself after the host nation won its 10th consecutive Asian Games team gold in Guangzhou on Saturday night. It totaled 368.5 points to Japan's 357.5 and the Republic of Korea's 352.9.

"Everyone on the team was relaxed during the competition, which was more like a training session for us," Chen Yibing, the 2008 Olympic champion and 2010 world champion on rings, told China Daily. "We just compete with ourselves."

Chen fell off the pommel horse, the only obvious error by China, while Ryosuke Baba of Japan committed major errors that saw his team take silver. He fell twice on the pommel horse after hurting his thumb on the parallel bars earlier in the day

"We didn't know Japan made mistakes because they competed in the morning while we competed in the evening," Chen said. "We just concentrated on our preparations so we didn't pay attention to how other teams performed."

Baba regretted his mistakes, adding, "China deserves to win because they are the world champion and their performance proved that."

All six members of China's gold medal-winning team from last month's world championships in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, were present in Guangzhou. The team features three current world apparatus champions, including Chen, Feng Zhe (parallel bars) and Zhang Chenglong (high bar).

Japan finished just behind China at the world championships, but it was weakened here. It was missing two-time world all-round champion Kohei Uchimura as it tried to improve on the silver it won four years ago in Doha.

China men's coach Chen Xiong was very pleased with his athletes' performance, saying, "I think they did a better job here than in the world championships."

China's men rarely have problems securing gold medals on the parallel bars, high bar and pommel horse thanks to a number of gold-medal contenders in those events. However, they are at their weakest in the all-around, the coach said. Lu Bo finished sixth in Rotterdam while Teng Haibin was 11th.

One major challenger missing from Saturday's team final was the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. It was suspended from international competition for two years after the International Gymnastics Federation ruled this month that female gymnast Hong Su-jong, who won silver in the vault at the 2007 world championships, had falsified her age.

China Daily

(China Daily 11/15/2010 page10)