Levi Jung Ruivivar reached the women’s uneven bars finals on her third attempt in the 2024 FIG Artistic Gymnastics World Cup Series, this time at the Baku leg on Friday in Azerbaijan.
Ruivivar’s Olympic qualification campaign took a significant turn after top Filipino male gymnast Carlo Yulo advanced to the finals of his favorite event, the floor exercise, but missed a chance to defend his crown in the parallel bars.
The 17-year-old, Los Angeles-California-born Ruivivar landed sixth in the preliminaries, qualifying her for the finals with a score 13.466 points.
Algerian Kaylia Neymour topped the preliminaries with 15.433, with Elisa Iorio, the bronze medalist of the World Championships, in second with 14.466, and Chinese bet Siyu Du in third (14.266), followed by USA’s Katelyn Jong (13.966).
Hard work is now paying off for Ruivivar, who vowed to do better in the last two stages of the series.
“No matter how I score at the next two meets, I have to say I am proud and honored to be representing the Philippines in the international stage. There are so many talented gymnasts at these competitions,” said Ruivivar before she plunged into action in Baku.
It was Ruivivar’s sixth season in the elite competitions, after first bursting into the scene in the junior division of the World Olympic Gymnastics Academy Classics back in 2018.
Ruivivar is with another Filipino-American bet Emma Malabuyo in Baku, and they seek to join Yulo and Aleah Finnegan in the Paris Olympics with the qualification points that they will earn in the four legs of the World Cup.
The last two legs in Baku and in Doha this April will determine if Ruivivar and Malabuyo will make it to the quadrennial meet.
So far, Ruivivar, an incoming student-athlete at Stanford University, settled for 12th in the uneven bars’ prelims with 13.33 points to miss the finals back in the Cottbus leg two weeks ago.
This gave Ruivivar 12 points to stay at no. 6 in the 2024 Apparatus World Cup’s Women’s Artistic Gymnastics Reallocated Points Rankings of the International Gymnastics Federation.
During the Cairo event, she missed the cut in the finals of the uneven bars when she placed 13th with a total of 13.033 points.
She now has a total of 44 points, with Charlize Moerz of Austria taking no. 1 with 50 points in the Olympic rankings, after snatching for the country the bronze in the floor exercise in Cottbus.
Natalia Westlund of Sweden is in second with 39, Alena Tsivaets of Belarus is in third with 30, and Sara Selukic of Croatia is in fourth with 28 points.
Meanwhile, Yulo, got 14.333 points to finish behind Japan’s Kazuki Minami (14.466) and South Korea’s Ryu Sung-hyun (14.366) in the floor exercises prelims.
All three reached the finals with Milad Karimi of Kazakhstan, Yuri Guimaraes of Brazil, Aurel Benovic of Croatia, individual neutral athlete Yahor Sharamkou of Belarus, and Illia Kovtun of Ukraine.
Unfortunately, Yulo, who won the parallel bars title last year in the Baku leg of the World Cup, missed the championship round when he tallied 14.5 points in the qualification phase for ninth place.
The Leveriza, Manila-born Yulo tied with Kazuki Matsumi, who eked out a higher execution score of 8.6 and 8.2, to clinch the eighth and last final-round spot.
China’s Zou Jingyuan, the reigning Olympic parallel bars’ champion and a three-time world titlist in the apparatus, led the field with an impressive 15.766 points.