LIVERPOOL (Reuters) -
Daiki Hashimoto, Japan’s Olympic champion of men’s all-around in last year’s Tokyo Games, has claimed his first world title in this event at the 51st Artistic Gymnastics World Championships.
Hashimoto, 22, won the rematch with China’s Zhang Boheng whom he lost to at last year’s World Championships by just 0.017 points.
After two rotations, Hashimoto took the top position while Zhang reduced their gap to 0.499 points after claiming the highest score on the rings.
As they collected exactly the same scores on both vault and the horizontal bar, an advantage of 0.066 points on the parallel bars wasn’t enough for Zhang to beat Hashimoto, who eventually won the gold with 87.198 points.
Zhang followed behind with 86.765 points while Hashimoto’s teammate Wataru Tanigawa took the bronze with 85.231 points.
“His performance is so good,” Hashimoto commented on Zhang. “I couldn’t win this competition last year because he won. So I felt sad.”
“Competing against him was a motivation (today). The battle with Zhang Boheng is so good.”
Zhang was disappointed with his performance, marking five out of ten on his overall performance.