KYODO NEWS



 

Japan's men booked their ticket to the 2024 Paris Olympics by winning silver in the team all-around final Wednesday at the gymnastics world championships in Liverpool.

The team led by reigning Olympic individual all-around and horizontal bar gold medalist Daiki Hashimoto totaled 253.395 points to finish behind China with 257.858, and ahead of hosts Britain with 247.229.

All three medal winners earned the right to send five-man teams to Paris.
Japan had been favorite after topping qualifying, but a number of missteps by the Tokyo silver medal-winning outfit allowed China to claim its 13th men's team title at the world championships and its first since 2018.

The Japanese team -- also including Kakeru Tanigawa, Wataru Tanigawa, Ryosuke Doi and Yuya Kamoto -- looked shaky at various stages of the competition, with Hashimoto falling during his usually dominant horizontal bar routine.

"We may have gotten caught up in the atmosphere of the final," Hashimoto said.

"We had difficulty giving our best performance. It's frustrating, but if we all keep practicing to be the best in the world, we can win."

Gymnasts from Russia, who won the men's team all-around at last summer's Tokyo Games, as well as the most recent world championships to include the event, have been banned from international competition over their country's invasion of Ukraine.