Yulo on target to win three world championship golds

Philippines’ Carlos Edriel Yulo competes in the floor event at the men’s team qualification during the Artistic Gymnastics World Championships at the Kitakyushu City Gymnasium in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka prefecture on October 20, 2021. (Photo by Philip FONG / AFP)

On a mission to redeem himself, Carlos Yulo is good for at least two gold medals in the finals of the FIG (International Gymnastics Federation) Artistic Gymnastics World Championships this weekend—according to the chief of the country’s national gymnastics federation.

But Munehiro Kugimiya, Yulo’s Japanese coach, believes the Filipino dynamo could do better than that.

“This is what my gut tells me: Caloy can win two golds and one silver. But coach Mune feels that Caloy will get all three [golds],’’ said Gymnastics Association of the Philippines president Cynthia Carrion-Norton.

Yulo, who stumbled in the Tokyo Olympics after riding really high hopes for a gold medal there, will let his performance do the talking as he begins hunting for those golds on Saturday and Sunday.

The journey toward redemption will begin, quite aptly, with the floor exercise on Saturday. Yulo is the reigning world champion in the event, which he ruled in Germany in 2019. He was also a favorite in that discipline in Tokyo, but a wobbly landing early in his routine sent his Olympic hopes crashing.

He finished 44th in the qualification round and failed to advance to the final.

He progressed easily this time around, topping the floor exercise preliminaries in the world tournament, which is currently being held in Kitakyushu, Japan. He scored a strong 15.166 in the floor prelims, while advancing also in the other two events that he signed up for.

A near-flawless output in the parallel bars sent him into the final on Sunday as the surprise top seed with 15.566 points. Meanwhile, he advanced to the final of the vault with a third-best score of 14.808.

“I feel that the two gold medals will come in the floor exercise and the parallel bars. He will pull through with a silver in the vault,’’ said Carrion-Norton, who made a similar prediction for the 21-year-old star during the Olympics.

Yulo wound up making the final of just one event, the vault, where he came to within a sniffing distance of a podium finish.

“I wanted to step up my game. I didn’t want to make the same mistakes,’’ the FIG quoted Yulo as saying after the qualification round of the three apparatuses.

Yulo has been based in Japan since he received a scholarship from the Japan Olympic Association in 2016.

“Caloy is really focused with coach Mune for the world championship. He knows the importance of this tournament for his quest for a gold [in the 2024 Paris Olympics],’’ said Carrion-Norton.

Prior to 2024 Paris, Yulo will test himself in two more world championships in 2022 Liverpool, Great Britain, and 2023 Antwerp, Belgium.