China gymnasts continue gold rush at world cup final
15/12/2008 17:16
Cheng Fei added her second gold on floor at the conclusion of the World
Cup Final yesterday as Chinese gymnasts capped their fantastic year with five
titles out of ten in the two-day event.
Cheng followed up her vault win on
Saturday and claimed floor's title, edging compatriot Jiang Yuyuan.
Feng Zhe,
19, dramatically gave China a second title of the day, sharing men's parallel
bars gold medal with Yann Cucherat of France despite his opening
mistake.
China also had a bronze medal on women's beam through Li
Shanshan.
On Saturday, He Kexin and Jiang Yuyuan had a Chinese one-two finish
on women's uneven bars with He atop courtesy of an amazing difficulty score of
7.3 points, and Zhang Hongtao, who was even not in China's Beijing Olympic team,
clinched gold on men's pommel horse.
Chinese gymnasts dominated the Beijing
Olympic, collecting nine titles out of the 14 including the most-coveted men's
and women's team golds.
Their achievement in Madrid reiterated China's
indisputable leadership in this sport although a dozen of world's top gymnasts
were absent from the year-end tournament.
France became the only country
besides China to win more than one title with Olympic runner-up Thomas Bouhail
striking gold on men's vault.
Lauren Mitchell of Australia won balance beam
while Epke Zonderland of the Netherlands took the title on high bar.
Cheng,
world champion for three consecutive years, made a strong rebound from her
failure in Beijing, where she was a pre-Games favorite for vault and floor in
Beijing but her slips in both events ruined her title opportunities.
She won
by a clear edge, scoring 15.375 points with a joint highest difficulty and the
best execution in the exercise, but not without trouble - she had to overcome
the disappointment on beam, where she fell off the apparatus twice, before
reconcentrating on her game on floor.
"Balance beam is not my strongest
apparatus, so I was not that confident. I was very nervous on the beam and made
terrible mistakes," Cheng said.
"But that happened. I just tried not to think
about it and regain the right feeling. I'm happy I did it."
Cheng also said
that the two titles in Madrid offset her disappointment in Beijing more or
less.
"My purpose to compete in Madrid is to restore the confidence as well
as to win golds. Whatever the result is, I want to give a satisfying performance
this time. I'm happy I did it."
Feng went slightly off-balance in his opening
element on parallel bars but his difficulty score, highest on parallel bars,
allowed him to tie Cucherat for the title. Ukraine's Valeriy Goncharov, the 2004
Olympic champion, was third.
Japan's leading character Hiroyuki Tomita, who
will retire after this tournament, could have ended his career on high notes but
touched the mat with his fingers on landing after a superb routine.
The 2005
world all-around champion finished third behind Zonderland and Australia's
Philippe Rizzo.
Xinhua
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