Artistic gymnastics at Paris 2024 gets underway at the Bercy Arena on Saturday.
Here, AFP Sport looks at three things to watch out for in the sport that has figured at each Olympic Games since 1896:
Fireworks on the vault
The women’s vault final promises to be a spellbinding, gravity-defying affair. Saturday week’s show should have spectators on the edge of their seats, and their jaws in their laps if Simone Biles unleashes her most daring move — the Biles II.
One of five of her eponymous skills, it involves the ‘simple’ matter of a Yurchenko double pike — a roundoff onto the springboard followed by a back handspring onto the vault table with two back flips in the straight-legged pike position. Definitely not for the faint-hearted.
The American superstar wooed the world when she became the first woman to perform the move in competition at the 2021 US Classic, and it was named in her honour when she landed it at the 2023 world championships.
Biles’ main challenger for gold could be Rebeca Andrade, the Brazilian who captured the vault title in Tokyo in Biles’ well documented absence. Andrade also won world gold in Antwerp last year, but only by .100 after a Biles fall.
Then there’s Yeo Seo-jeong. The South Korean deployed her own signature skill — the ‘Yeo’ — to spring into bronze in Tokyo, a first for her country. Yeo was keeping it in the family, as her skill combined the two named after her father Yeo Hong-chul, silver medallist at Atlanta 1996.
Others out to stop Biles regaining the gold she won at Rio 2016 are her compatriot Jade Carey, silver medallist in Tokyo and the 2022 world vault champion, and Mexico’s Alexa Moreno, who if successful will have to add another chapter to her autobiography.
Flying the flag for Ukraine
The Ukrainian gymnasts arrive in Paris on a tide of goodwill and with a homemade national flag to bring them luck. Not that they need much of that valuable commodity on current form.
They will have plenty of support from impartial observers and the athletes from the war-torn country entertain live medal hopes if recent results are anything to go by.
Illia Kovtun inched the men past Britain to European team gold in Italy in April, alongside Nazar Chepurnyi, Igor Radivilov, Radomyr Stelmakh and Oleg Verniaiev. Kovtun added individual titles on parallel bars and high bar. Russia’s invasion has forced the team to train in Croatia for the past few months.
Teenager Anna Lashchevska, a World Cup winner on the beam, completes the Ukrainian line-up in Bercy. And that flag? It was lovingly embroidered with flowers by a Ukrainian woman and fan of Kovtun’s.
Home advantage?
Hosts France will be hoping history repeats itself. The first time Paris hosted the Games, in 1900, gymnastics was confined to the men’s individual all-around, women only being allowed to compete from 1928. France swept the floor, factory worker Gustave Sandras taking gold at Vincennes hippodrome, with his compatriots filling the next 18 places.
The second time, in 1924, they also picked up a title, in the men’s sidehorse vault. Their third and last gold came in 2004. It’s fair to say the intervening 124 years since Paris 1900 has seen the competition blossom, and its place as one of the Games’ headline acts assured.
“Gymnastics has been part of the essence of the Olympic Games since their revival in 1896. Paris 2024 gives us a unique opportunity to see how our sport has evolved over the past century since the Olympic Games in Paris in 1924,” Morinari Watanabe, head of the sport’s governing body the FIG, commented.
Buoyed by the support of their home crowd at the Bercy Arena, the 2024 hosts are pinning their medal hopes on Melanie De Jesus Dos Santos, the 24-year-old Martinique-born gymnast who led the French women to all-around bronze at last year’s world championships.
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