Uchimura wins gymnastics all-around in style
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E-mail Xinhua, August 2, 2012
Kohei Uchimura moved a step forward in the Olympics stage to win the men's all-around of gymnastics Wednesday following a silver four years ago in Beijing.
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Kohei Uchimura of Japan dismounts the horizontal bar in the Artistic Gymnastics men's Individual All-Around final on Day 5. |
Uchimura did not execute all the six apparatuses smoothly, but a strong performance from the first five routines was enough to secure the title in spite of a fault from the hand touch on floor after a tumbling action, collecting 92.690 points.
The Japanese gymnast, who came to London as the only one winning three consecutive world championships in all-around, maintained his momentum in recent years, grasping the top place after the vault, his second discipline, and never looked back.
This is the first all-around Olympics title for Japan since the 1984 Los Angeles Games and also the second gold medal here after Japan won the first from women's judo.
Germany's Marcel Nguyen, gold medalist on parallel bars at 2011 and 2012 European championships, won the silver, 1.559 points behind the winner.
Nguyen was placed 12th all-around at the 2009 worlds and eighth in the same event one year later.
American Danell Leyva, who leads the qualification and is the gold medalist on parallel bars at 2011 worlds, successfully to nail a place on the podium thanks to a strong routine on horizontal bar, which earned him 15.700 points.
Leyva took advantage of his specialty on horizontal bar, in which he qualified in third place, to leapt three place for the medal.
Uchimura's teammate Kazuhito Tanaka, who was second prior to the last apparatus, missed the medal table due to a fall on the pommel horse and finished only in sixth place.
Both Nguyen and Leyva fell off the pommel horse, which diminished their chance to challenge Uchimura.
Mykolva Kuksenkov was in the fourth place, just 0.266 points trailing Leyva.
Russia's David Belyavskiy was another gymnast to be knocked out of the top three in the final discipline, in which he scored only 14.766 points on horizontal bar.
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