An Olympic gold medal is never earned by playing safe. Either you lose failing, or immortalize your name in the pantheon of greatness.
Carlos Yulo left all his cards on the table, and did not play safe.
The gymnast ahead of him, reigning gold medalist Artem Dolgopyat of Israel, wowed the crowd with textbook, clean routines for a high score of 14.966 points, matching the top qualification score of the United Kingdom’s Jake Jarman.
Unfazed, Yulo went for the most difficult stunts; he did not mind if his landing would be imperfect. Point deductions are very pivotal in an Olympic final and a fraction shaved due to a stunt fault can put a gymnast to last place. To add more pressure, he had to surpass Dogopyat’s seemingly insurmountable score.
Yulo’s first two stunts, of Olympic-level difficulty, were shaky—the landings were not as impressive as that of Dolgapyat’s, but were clean.
But, like a WWE superstar, the 4’11” muscleman with the acrobatic dexterity of a Rey Mysterio had a secret finisher to pin the rest of the competition to submission.
That three-and-half twist, perhaps the hardest stunt in gymnastics, executed to perfection with Yulo landing squarely on the mat, was his tombstone piledriver.
After a tense minute, the judges gave Yulo the nod—15.000 points—to deny the Israeli a title defense.
While Jarman impressed and had a serious routine to threaten Yulo’s lead, the man from Leveriza Street of Malate, Manila ultimately won the gold medal in the 2024 Paris Olympics men’s artistic gymnastics floor exercise on a boisterous Saturday evening at Paris’ Bercy Arena.
It was a long journey for Yulo to the gold. As a child living in the periphery of the Rizal Memorial Sports Complex, the playground phenom was brought by his grandpa to be trained by the Gymnastics Association of the Philippines (GAP) at age 7.
The diminutive kid, whose short stature was more of a blessing than a curse that enabled him to be more flexible and balanced, had a shaky start in his maiden Palarong Pambansa the way he was shaky on his first couple of stunts tonight, but Yulo’s silver medal finish in floor exercise when he was nine marked his utter domination of subsequent Palaro editions.
With little domestic competition, as a teenager Yulo lorded the gymnastics floor of the 2014 ASEAN School Games, where he represented Adamson University, and two Pacific Rim crowns. His destiny of world glory was already being carved in the mid-2010s.
The kid, now a grown young adult, had a career trajectory that could not be stopped even by a global pandemic.
Starting in the 2019 World Championships in Stuttgart, where he became the first Filipino gymnastics world champion by topping floor exercise, Yulo would become the most decorated Filipino gymnast of all time, winning nine SEA Games golds, 10 Asian Championship crowns, and five Apparatus World Cup golds,
Yulo then won another world title in 2021, that time topping vault, which was his Olympic breakthrough in Tokyo months prior, where he unexpectedly reached the finals (he was more favored in floor exercise, which he muffed) and placed sixth overall.
Three years later, the crown jewel—an Olympic gold medal—was at hand.
Yulo won it by giving all his darn best, the same way weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz did in Tokyo 2020.
But, given Yulo’s game face during the medal awarding, where the Philippine anthem was played for the second time and on the centenary of the country’s Olympic participation, half the mission is done as the Man from Manila will vie for vault glory.
Walang uwian. Kita-kits bukas ng gabi.
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