The Philippine team troops to the 33rd SEA Games in Thailand in December without its most decorated athlete – Paris Olympics double-gold gymnastics medalist Carlos Yulo.
‘Carlos isn’t joining anymore,’ said Gymnastics Association of the Philippines president Cynthia Carrion. ‘He wants to give his teammates a chance to win a gold in the SEA Games.’
Without Yulo, who has won a total nine golds and the same number of silvers in the biennial meet since 2019 in Manila, it will now be up to Juancho Miguel Besana, John Ivan Cruz and Justine Ace de Leon to carry the fight and raked in those mints that the former used to harvest.
Yulo made the decision after Thailand limited participants to just one apparatus each, and scratched the team event where the Filipinos would have been the heavy favorites to win.
But Yulo remained focused on the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships that opened yesterday in Jakarta, Indonesia where he would nurse a minor wrist injury he sustained recently.
‘I kind of have been having trouble with my wrists,’ said Yulo in a recent interview with sports website olympic.com.’I still want the taste of competition, that is the most important thing for me right now.’
‘My goal is to perform beautiful gymnastics, to be really graceful. I want to show really good and graceful gymnastics. (So) I’m just really happy that I get to compete,’ he added.
Yulo, along with the rest of the men’s squad, was scheduled to see action in the Subdivision 6 of the men’s qualification last night, hoping he could make the men’s individual all-around finals set Wednesday and, hopefully, the apparatus finals slated Friday and Saturday.
Meanwhile, the country’s women’s squad of Paris Olympians Aleah Finnegan and Emma Malabuyo and Haylee Garcia and Yulo’s younger sister Elaiza, is set in the Subdivision 7 of the women’s qualification Tuesday.