YULO TARGETS 3 GOLDS IN WORLDS

CARLOS YULO will be the man to watch in the 50th Artistic Gymnastics World Championships which stake apparatus and floor exercise titles at the General Gymnasium in Kitakyushu, Japan, on Saturday. “Everybody’s afraid of him. When he walks around, everybody knows who he is and everybody remembers him [after his performance in the qualification],” Gymnastic Association of the Philippines President Cynthia Carrion-norton told Businessmirror on Friday. Yulo goes for the gold medals in the floor exercise and parallel bar, both of which he topped in the qualifiers, and in the vault, where he was third, this weekend.

The 21-yearold Yulo is defending his floor

Vexercise gold in the final starting at 3:10 p.m. on Saturday and will shoot for the vault title at 3:25 p.m. and the parallel bars finals at 5 p.m. on Sunday, all Manila time. There’s no day off for Yulo.

“He is still training like the other eight finalists who wanted to get the gold,” Carrion-norton said.

The world championships offer another opportunity for Yulo to shine—especially in the floor exercise which he ruled two years ago in Stuttgart, Germany—in the absence of Tokyo Olympics gold medalist Artem Dolgopyat of Israel, silver medalist Rayderley Zapata of Spain and bronze medalist Xiao Ruoteng of China. “Officials from the gymnastics federation of Israel told me that he [Dolgopyat] had to stop training due to all interviews and TV shows as winner of the Olympic gold medal,” Carrion-norton said.

Also absent are Zou Jingyuan of China, Lukas Dauser of Germany and Ferhat Arican of Turkey who finished 1-2-3 in parallel bars in Tokyo, as well as the podium finishers in vault.

Yulo will compete in the floor exercise against Japan’s Kazuki Minami and double Olympic gold medalist Daiki Hashimoto, Kazakhstan’s Milad Karimi, South Korea’s Ryu Sunghyun, Britain’s Hayden Skinner, Finland’s Emil Soravuo, US’S Yul Moldauer, Ukraine’s Illia Kovtun, Italy’s Nicola Bartoloni and Russia’s Ivan Stretovich.

With Yulo in the finals of vault are Ukraine’s Nazar Chepurnyi, South Korea’s Hakseon Yang, Japan’s Hidenobu Yonekura, Britain’s Courtney Tulloch, Israel’s Andrey Medvedev, Italy’s Thomas Grasso and Nicola Bartoleni, Canada’s William Emard, Turkey’s Adem Asil and Russia’s Mukhammadzhon Iakubov.

Also in the finals of the parallel bars are Chinese Zhang Boheng and Xuwei Hu, Japanese Daiki Hashimoto, Kazuma Kaya, Swiss Christian Baumann, American Yul Moldauer, Brazilian Caio Souza, Illias, Cypriot Mario Georgeou and Mexican Isaac Nuñez.