Taiwan’s team (or, rather, Chinese Taipei’s as the Olympic Committee chooses to call it) made history at these Worlds by not only qualifying to the Olympics but also making the men’s team final. Taiwan beat such big gymnastics teams as Brazil, Germany, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Last year, they only finished 17th and in 2015, they were 23rd.
In addition to Lee Chih Kai, another Taiwanese gymnast, Shiao Yu-Jan, made the pommel horse final, while Tang Chia-Hung topped the high bar qualification. Taiwan will also have two gymnasts in the all-around program. While the fans might be surprised, the head coach of the team says the competition went exactly according to his plan.
Sadao Hamada coached the men’s gymnastics team in Stanford for many years. In 2015, he moved to Taiwan to become the head coach of the men’s national team. He said, at the beginning, it took some time for other coaches to believe in his strategy:
“I’ve been coaching the team since 2015. When I got there, the team was about 24th in the world, but I saw a lot of potential. So, I figured, if I did everything right, we could maybe qualify to the Olympics in four years. From there on, I started with very basics, teaching them the basics. And, in the beginning, especially after one year, our team scores went down. And the Taiwanese coaches were wondering: hey, Hamada’s no good, in the competitions, our team is worse than before. But everything went according to the plan. And things improved, especially on the pommel horse. I’ve been teaching them basics there. Now, they can improve and they score higher. Last year, we were 17th in the world, but today we did very well. My target score was 250 and we established that today. We had a 12-point improvement compared to the score we got last year. With the 250 we got today, we would’ve been 5th at the last Worlds. So, I’m very happy with their progress.”
He believes that such success can be achieved even without having a deep program with many gymnasts on the reserve bench:
“It doesn’t matter what country you work in. You don’t need hundreds of good kids. What you need is a handful of them, ten, maybe. As long as you have five guys you can put on the floor at a competition, you don’t need twenty. A program needs government support and in Taiwan, we have that. Then the national federation has to make good decisions. And the last thing you need is quality coaches.”
Taiwan will compete in the team final tomorrow and will try to go up from the 8th place in the qualification.
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