At his third Olympics, David Belyavskiy finally won a gold medal – as a part of the Russian team. However, he was unable to win medals in the two event finals he qualified to. He finished fourth in the pommel horse final, less than 0.1 behind the bronze medalist Kaya Kazuma, and fifth on parallel bars, the event where he won bronze in Rio.
Belyavskiy hoped to win a medal on parallel bars again but did not do his best routine today and lost to the medalists in difficulty:
“I’m calm, I’m not in a good or a bad mood. First of all, I didn’t have enough difficulty. Of course, it’s possible to compete with them [the medalists], if I’ll have higher difficulty. But I had hope for a medal today. I didn’t [hope for a medal] on pommel horse, but I wanted to medal on bars. I competed with the same guys at the European Championships and was able to beat them all except for Turkey’s [gymnast Ferhat Arican].”
Belyavskiy won silver at the latest European Championships in Bern where today’s bronze medalist Ferhat Arican won gold and today’s silver medalist Lucas Dauser tied for bronze. Tokyo’s gold medalist Zou Jingyuan wom gold on parallel bars at the 2017 World Championships, where Belyavskiy finished in third.
Belyavskiy said he expected more in terms of how the Olympics were organized:
“To sum up the games, the team performed well. The team gold always outweighs all the other medals, no matter how many of them there are. I’m happy with the judging, everything’s fine. If we’re talking about organization [of the Games], I didn’t like it much. I expected much more from Japan. I guess [the organizational issues] are because of the pandemic.”
At 29, Belyavskiy hopes to go for his fourth Olympics but will get some rest first and skip the upcoming World Championships in October:
“Regarding the Paris Olympics, I’ll try. Depends on my health. I don’t know, we’ll see. For now, I intend to continue, of course. I’m going to recover now, I won’t go to the World Championships in the fall, I won’t even train for that.”
Photo: Russian Artistic Gymnastics Federation
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