Former World champion Carlos Yulo showed how ready he is to compete in the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Yulo has completed a journey of redemption, bouncing back from an empty-handed performance four months ago with one gold and a silver at the end of the 16th Artistic Gymnastics World Cup Championships on Saturday night at the Ladies Sports Hall I Doha, Qatar.
First, the 23-year-old Yulo missed the top honors by a fraction of a point in a close contest with Tokyo Olympics’ bronze medallist Artur Davtyan, who grabbed the gold medal with 15.066 points in the men’s vault finals.
Belarusian gymnast Yahor Sharamkou settled for the bronze with 14.749 points.
With his tally of 15.066 points for the silver, Yulo then went on to grab the parallel bars’ gold, finishing with 15.200 points, ahead of Taipei’s Yuan His Huang and Brazilian bet Caio Souza.
Huang and Souza took the silver and bronze with 14.966 points and 14.566, respectively.
It was Yulo’s best showing after walking away from the World Artistic Gymnastics Championship in Antwerp, Belgium last October without a medal.
In all, the Philippines won a total of three medals in Doha, two from Yulo and one from Fil-American bet LeVi Jung-Ruivivar, who earned a silver and a Paris Olympic qualification slot in the uneven bars for her first podium finish in a World Cup.
Earlier, Yulo won a bronze in the floor exercises of the Baku leg last March.
Ruivivar, showing how much she has recovered from an injury an incoming freshman at Stanford University, tallied 13.633 points, behind French-Algerian star Kayla Nemour, who won the gold medal by almost two points with 15.366.
The 17-year old Nemour, who already booked a Paris Olympics slot last year, had an execution score of 8.366, and difficulty of seven points, while Ruivivar strung up tallies of 7.833 and 5.8.
Ruivivar got the second slot at stake in the Olympics after accumulating reallocated Olympic ranking points for joining all three legs of the World Cups, which included the Cairo, Cottbus and Baku stops.
For Ruivivar, everything went according to plan, as she and her coach Ivan Goriatchkine took LeVi’s participation in each of the World Cup leg as a warmup for the next one.
“The first of the competitions (Cairo) was almost like a warmup. I was happy with how I did in the bars, and I definitely wanted to clean up my executions,” said Ruivivar before she went to Doha.
Meanwhile, Emma Malabuyo, who missed the cut to the finals of the women’s floor exercises, awaits the final outcome of the 2024 Apparatus World Cup WAG Reallocated Points Rankings.
