Vault, Men

The favourite for the vault was North Korea’s Ri Se-Gwang, who came into the final as the best of the qualifiers, slightly ahead of Russia’s Denis Ablyazin who, less than an hour earlier, had won bronze on the rings. Ablyazin won silver in London 2012 while Se-Gwang was the reigning World Vault Champion, having retained the title he first won in 2014. Four men came through the qualifiers each on 15.283 points, including 2015 World Championship runner-up, 35-year-old Marian Drăgulescu of Romania, the 2002 World Gymnast of the Year who had an impressive list of eight World and nine European titles to his credit. Also qualified on 15.283 was Ihor Radivilov, the bronze medallist in London and silver medallist at the 2014 World Championships.

Russia’s Nikita Nagorny was the early leader with 15.316, but was soon overtaken by Kenzo Shirai of Japan with 15.449, and he was then joined on the same score by the experienced Drăgulescu. Se-Gwang put in two great vaults, firstly a double somersault with half twist, which was followed by his own version of the Tsukahara. He stumbled slightly on landing after both vaults, but each had such a high merit of difficulty the stumbles hardly affected the scoring and his score came out at 15.691 as he went into the lead ahead of Shirai and Drăgulescu. The first three remained the same until the very last vault of the competition by Denis Ablyazin whose 15.516 vaulted him into second place behind the North Korean. The bronze medal went to Shirai on the tie-break rule because his highest scoring vault was greater than Drăgulescu’s highest. Ri Se-Gwang became the first North Korean to win an Olympic men’s vault gold medal and only the third athlete from his country to win a gymnastics gold after Pae Gil-Su on the horse at Barcelona in 1992 and Hong Un-Jong on the women’s horse at Beijing in 2008.