To justify its stature as one of the strong powers in gymnastics, China survived a tough finals to take the first gold medal from the men's team competitions at the 37th world gymnastics championships Tuesday evening in Anaheim, California, the United States.
Against an over-heating audience cheering for the hosts, the Chinese gymnasts collected a total of 171.996 points for the top honor, by ranking first on four of the six apparatus, namely pommel horse, vault, parallel bars and the horizontal bar. They also finished second on the floor exercise, the opening event of the finals.
"I think we did pretty good, we weren't too nervous as we've prepared for the meet for a long time," said double Olympic champion Li Xiaopeng, "As the meet happened, we felt a little bit of pressure, especially on the last three events. But finally, we just tried our best to focus and just hit our routines as we usually do."
Apart from Li, the Chinese squad also boasted of other three Olympic winning team members of Yang Wei, Huang Xu and Xing Aowei, together with two newcomers of Xiao Qin and Teng Haibin.
This was the sixth world title for the Chinese men during the past 100-year history of the world gymnastics, following their victories in 1983, 1994, 1995, 1997 and 1999.
"We have expected the tough challenges from the United States, but after the first events and we are still leading, I'm full of confidence as we know we are strong on the horizontal bar," said Chinese head coach Huang Yubin.
"I'm very happy for the title, and I'm glad that our newcomers also had their steady performance tonight," said Huang.
Hoping to strike for its first-ever world team title, the United States, like in the 2001 worlds, finished again in the second place with 171.121 points after a clever strategy was adopted by its gymnasts to perform easier routines to ensure a smooth performance on home turf.
"Add all of these points up that we gave away, and we could have won easily," said US coach Stacy Maloney, "But that's neither here nor there. China definitely demonstrated that they were the best team, we showed that there's a new competition out there."
American gymnast Paul Hamm said "I felt a lot of pressure. I knew it was close, not only with the Chinese in front but with Japan behind."
Japan, who led the preliminaries after skipping the 2001 worlds, took the bronze medal on 170.708, with its leading gymnast Naoya Tsukahara competing on every apparatus in the finals.
"We haven't won a medal (in a long time) so I'm happy," said Tsukahara, "We made mistakes on floor and parallel bars but I don't care about (our placing), I just care about how much we can accomplish as a team. We did our best."
Russia, led by Olympic all-around champion Alexei Nemov, was knocked out of the top three, finishing fourth in Anaheim with 168.771 points, followed by Romania (167.909), South Korea (166.283), France (165.546) and Ukraine (165.108).
(Xinhua News Agency August 21, 2003)
