CARLOS YULO owns two Olympic gold medals from Paris 2024, three world championships titles, 12 Asian championships mints and nine crowns at the Southeast Asian Games.
What’s missing for the floor exercise and vault champion in Paris is an Asian Games gold medal.
He had that chance in the delayed Hangzhou Asian Games in 2023 but ran conflict to the Antwerp world championships-a wise decision because it was in Belgium where he qualified for Paris and as they say, the rest was history.
But the Aichi-Nagoya 20th Asian Games pose a tough campaign for Yulo-he’ll be crossing paths with a phalanx of elite Japanese gymnasts.
‘Japan has many good Olympic gymnasts. It is going to be a tough competition,’ Yulo told the BusinessMirror. ‘But my goal is to win gold in the all-around besides the floor exercise and vault.’
‘They [Japanese] are not just Olympians, they’re gold medalist, too,’ added the 26-year-old Yulo, whose coach, Aldrin Castañeda, said that the host country is fielding it’s A-team.
Yulo’s most formidable rival is Shinnosuke Oka, a triple gold medalist in Paris-individual all-round, horizontal bars and part of the winning Japanese team-who also got bronze in the parallel bars.
The other potential opponent is Daiki Hashimoto, winn er of the individual all-round and horizontal bars gold medals in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
Shoma Tsukiyama, on the other hand, is a rising threat in the floor exercise following his silver at the Asian championships in Zunyi, China, last June.
Castañeda, agreed that the Japanese stand in Yulo’s way in the Asian Games gymnastics competition that are set September 20 to 24 at the Nagoya General Gymnasium Rainbow Hall.
‘We upgraded a little bit in the high bar by a point and then by three points in the rings,’ Castañeda said. ‘Next week, it’s going to be our routines and pre-evaluation. We need to improve in some apparatuses to strengthen and improve our individual all-around performance.’
Yulo made his Asian Games debut in Jakarta 2018 and placed seventh in men’s floor exercise despite topping the qualification and was fourth in vault.
Yulo and brother Karl Eldrew, along with Castañeda and physiotherapist Bethel Solano, are holding camp at the Tukushukai Gymnastics Training Facility in Tokyo and will proceed to Nagoya on September 17.
The Philippines has yet to medal in Asian Games gymnastics.