Tokyo World Cup 2011 closes the FIG World Cup series, leaving Great Britain and Japan proud
The Tokyo World Cup marked the end of this year’s International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) Artistic Gymnastics World Cup series. The event was scheduled for November 26 and 27.
The all-round title went to Kohei Uchimura of Japan who stole the show with his whopping total of 93.565 points. Uchimura’s win was comfortably ahead of the silver and bronze medallists.
The athlete scored the highest on four apparatus in the tournament, completely claiming the meet as a champion. He secured 15.700 points on floor exercise, 15.900 points on the vault, 15.433 points on parallel bars and 15.233 points on still rings.
Interesting to note was that it was Tokyo again where Uchimura was competing against Philipp Boy, and it was Boy again who came in second to Uchimura, this year.
In the World Gymnastics Championships in Tokyo last month, Boy’s post-event comment “I am in the wrong era”, caught much publicity. It appears that era has not ended yet, or Boy’s injury that occurred two weeks earlier was the hindering factor.
Either way, Germany’s Philipp Boy proudly sported his silver in a wordless announcement of his full recovery from the Stuttgart Cup injury. The two weeks seemed to have done Boy good. He scored a total of 90.098 points.
Great Britain’s Daniel Purvis is back in good form. Earlier this year, Purvis had taken a slow start, finishing in last at Jacksonville. Looks like Purvis has followed the tortoise tradition really well as he now stands at the top of the final International
World Cup standings.
Subsequently, his gold medal win in Glasgow and the bronze medal from Stuttgart have meshed with this win, taking his score over and above Ukraine’s Mykola Kuksenkov’s.
Kuksenkov was number one in the rankings up until the Tokyo World Cup took place.
However, he was unable to secure any of the top three positions and came in fifth in the Tokyo World Cup which brought his total World Cup points to stagnation at 115 points, while Purvis took the lead.
Meanwhile, Boy pulled his rankings up by 45 points and tied with Kuksenkov in second place.
Uchimura stands eighth in the World Cup rankings, with only the Tokyo World Cup’s all-round title to his claim from the series.
It is quite unfortunate that Purvis’ win came a year too late (or a year too early, thankfully) as the FIG will not be awarding the generous prize money to the male and female athletes who rank number one in World Cup standings this year.
The FIG, however, does reassure to pick up the jackpot tradition again next year.
The FIG World Cup series for 2011 closed on a proud note for Great Britain and Japan as their representatives earned them the World Cup series champion and Tokyo World Cup champion titles, respectively.
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