JAKARTA – Focusing on his pet events – the men’s floor exercise and vault – Paris Olympic double gold medalist Carlos Edriel Yulo will seek to add newer milestones when he goes into action in the 53rd FIG Artistic Gymnastics World Championships opening on Sunday at the Indonesia Arena here.
More than a year since his phenomenal success in the French capital, garnering a historic golden double to highlight the country’s centennial jubilee of participation in the modern Olympics, Yulo will be the man to watch at the 16,000-seat arena that was the site of the FIBA World Cup in 2024.
A wrist injury suffered in his build-up to the worlds, however, will limit his exposure to the floor exercise and vault events during the men’s artistic gymnastics qualification round, with the Philippine squad scheduled to perform in Subdivision 6 set at 8:20 p.m. (9:20 p.m. in Manila.)
He will be joined by Juancho Miguel Besana, John Ivan Cruz, and Justine Ace de Leon, who are making their debuts in the prestigious international gymnastics competition and whose outing is supported by the Philippine Sports Commission.
“I kind of have been having trouble with my wrists,” Yulo said in an interview last Thursday with the olympic.com website during podium training, disclosing that the injury was caused by learning a new dismount on the parallel bars.
“I kind of did it too much,” Yulo was quoted as saying in the report of the double pike front with a half-twist dismount.
But like a good soldier, the pint-sized phenom said this would not deter him from performing in his seventh straight world meet since debuting and bagging a bronze medal in the floor exercise in the 2018 edition in Doha, Qatar when he was just 18 years old.
“I still want the taste of competition,” Yulo stressed. “That is the most important thing for me right now."
“My goal is to perform beautiful gymnastics, to be really graceful. I want to show really good and graceful gymnastics. (So) I’m just really happy that I get to compete.”
Guiding the star athlete with the help of national coach Aldrin Castañeda is Australian mentor Nadel Alyousef, who was with the national team when they set up training camp in Metz, France before the Paris Olympics and was hired full-time by the Gymnastics Association of the Philippines in April.
The Australian coach, who won the 1994 National Coach of the Year Award in Australia, was with the PH squad that trained in Tokyo, Japan for three weeks before flying directly to the Indonesian capital
Also an accomplished international brevet judge, Alyousef, who was born in Syria but is now an Australian citizen, disclosed that he was one of the judges when Yulo scored a golden breakthrough in the men’s floor exercise at the 49th FIG Artistic Gymnastics World Championships in Stuttgart, Germany.
Given the gymnast’s outstanding twin triumphs, the Aussie coach understood how Yulo might feel the pressure in being back in the global spotlight anew since the current competition will be an individual showcase in the absence of team events in both MAG and WAG.
“At the Olympics, Carlos was chasing everybody. So when you chase, you put in a lot of hard work. Now, everybody is chasing you. You don’t know how hard you need to catch up with the rest. That is the issue,” Alyousef explained.
At least, Yulo will have one less potential rival in the floor exercise Tokyo Olympic gold medalist and Paris Olympic silver medalist Artem Dolgopyat of Israel, whose national team members were denied visas by Indonesian government authorities preventing them from entering the country.
But vying is Fil-British Jake Jarman, a bronze medalist in the floor exercise in Paris, while Iranian Mahdi Olfati, who took the gold medal in the vault in the Asian meet held last June in Jecheon, South Korea, could provide stiff competition for the Filipino bet in his other favorite event.
Bannered by Paris Olympians Aleah Finnegan and Emma Malabuyo, plus Haylee Garcia and Elaiza Yulo, the youngest sibling and sister of Carlos, the women’s squad is set to perform in the WAG classification round on Monday.
