Kōhei Uchimura

Kōhei Uchimura
Kōhei Uchimura (2011)
Personal information
Nationality:	Japan
discipline	Apparatus gymnastics
Society:	Konami Sports & Life
Birthday:	January 3, 1989
Place of birth:	Kitakyushu
Size:	162 cm
Weight:	52 kg
Medals
Olympic games silver 2008 Beijing All-around silver 2008 Beijing team gold 2012 London All-around silver 2012 London ground silver 2012 London team gold 2016 Rio de Janeiro All-around gold 2016 Rio de Janeiro team  World championships gold 2009 London All-around gold 2010 Rotterdam All-around silver 2010 Rotterdam team silver 2010 Rotterdam ground bronze 2010 Rotterdam Ingots gold 2011 Tokyo All-around gold 2011 Tokyo ground silver 2011 Tokyo team bronze 2011 Tokyo Horizontal bar gold 2013 Antwerp All-around gold 2013 Antwerp Ingots bronze 2013 Antwerp ground bronze 2013 Antwerp Horizontal bar gold 2014 Nanning All-around silver 2014 Nanning team silver 2014 Nanning Horizontal bar gold 2015 Glasgow All-around gold 2015 Glasgow team gold 2015 Glasgow Horizontal bar

Kōhei Uchimura ( Japanese 内 村 航 平 , Uchimura Kōhei ; born January 3, 1989 in Kitakyūshū , Fukuoka Prefecture ) is a Japanese gymnast . His greatest successes include winning eight world championship titles , including six wins in a row from 2009 to 2015. In 2012 and 2016 he became Olympic champion in the same discipline . At a height of 1.62 meters, his competition weight is 52 kilograms.

Life

childhood and education

Kōhei Uchimura is the son of Kazuhisa and Shūko Uchimura, who also went to gymnastics. When Emperor Akihito was enthroned a few days after Uchimura's birth and the Heisei era was proclaimed on January 8, 1989 , the parents changed his name to Kōhei, which roughly means "to navigate [into the] Hei [sei era]" .

According to her own statements, the mother wanted to convey "above all the spirit and attitude of an athlete" to her son . He began gymnastics in 1992 at the age of three in the training hall in Nagasaki, which is still operated by his father . As a child, he enjoyed doing somersaults and twists on the trampoline . At the age of six he took part in his first gymnastics competitions. In his youth, Uchimura often couldn't withstand the pressure in competitive situations. He also lacked the strength of his competitors, which he tried to make up for with rigorous training. After graduating from high school, Uchimura began to train more seriously.

Uchimura left his family at the age of 15 and moved to Tokyo in 2004 . There he trained at the renowned Asahi Seimei Gymnastics Club under Takashi Kobayashi and one of his training partners was Naoya Tsukahara , team Olympic champion from Athens 2004 . Kobayashi described Uchimura in retrospect upon arrival as a "skinny boy with gross abilities" . He gave his protégé extremely strenuous strength training by letting him repeat the same movements over and over again every day. This included running up to the jump or swinging back and forth on the horizontal bar. Kobayashi admired Uchimura for the great concentration he showed during the exercises. In 2005 the athlete took part in an international tournament for the first time, the International Japanese Junior Championships. A year later he was accepted into the Japanese national senior team.

Rise to the world's best all-rounder

In March 2007 Uchimura appeared for the first time at a senior tournament in Europe, the World Cup Internationaux de France in Paris . There he reached the device final on the vault , where he took third place behind the winner Marian Drăgulescu from Romania and the French Thomas Bouhail . With ninth place he just failed to reach the final on the ground . In May 2008 in Tianjin , China , Uchimura was able to record his first World Cup victory on the ground. Three months later he was also a member of the Japanese national team at the Summer Olympics in Beijing , which won the silver medal in the team competition behind the People's Republic of China, despite Uchimura falling on the pommel horse. The gymnast was suffering from a painful wrist injury at the time. Despite another fall on the pommel horse, Uchimura won the silver medal behind Chinese Yang Wei in the all-around final two days later . It was the first all- around medal by a Japanese gymnast since Kōji Gushiken's Olympic victory at the 1984 Summer Olympics . In the device final on the ground, Uchimura achieved fifth place in the victory of the Chinese Zou Kai . In the same year, the 19-year-old, who had announced after the Olympics that he wanted to lead Japanese gymnastics ( "After that, I knew where I was in the world and that gold was available to me here" ) won the Japanese championship in all- around for the first time with the seniors. It was the first youth victory since Naoya Tsukahara's success in 1996.

Uchimura after his 2010 World Cup victory in the all-around competition together with the runner-up German Philipp Boy (left) and bronze medal winner Jonathan Horton from the USA

After Yang Wei's resignation, Uchimura became the dominant all-rounder at world championships in the following years. At the 2009 World Gymnastics Championships in London , he won the all-around title for the first time with 91,500 points. In his victory, he was more than three points ahead of his second-placed compatriot Kazuhito Tanaka and received the best marks on four of six machines (floor, rings , jump and horizontal bar ). Despite injuries not fully cured at the 2010 World Gymnastics Championships in Rotterdam (shoulder injury) and in 2011 in Tokyo (ankle sprain), he was the first athlete in gymnastics history to win the all-around title three times in a row. In 2011 he also achieved top marks on four machines (floor, pommel horse, rings and parallel bars) and also won the floor final, again silver with the team and bronze on the horizontal bar.

Uchimura, who renounced the newly introduced lucrative all-around World Cup series in 2011 in favor of preparation for the home World Cup, according to critics, shows the most difficult elements and combinations on all six machines with an elegance and lightness that has never before been seen in modern men's gymnastics were presented. This enables Uchimura to keep up with the specialists on individual devices. In 2012, before the Summer Olympics in London, he led the unofficial list of D-marks with 39.3 points. The Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun called him at the 2011 home World Cup as an "unprecedented Superman " . Uchimura himself does not attach any importance to the grade judges in gymnastics. He puts the quality of his exercises over won titles and, according to his own statements, tries to exercise with care at every sporting event, always looking for the ultimate performance. Uchimura described the Belarusian Vitaly Scherbo as the greatest gymnast in history , who won six gold medals at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona . According to his own statements, his goal is to achieve even more admirable performances than Scherbo did.

2012 Olympic season

The extremely sport-focused Uchimura spent a year preparing for the 2012 Summer Olympics mostly alone and was often the first to come to morning training before all other athletes. At the beginning of the Olympic gymnastics competitions, the Japanese, who was always serene and confident, fell from the horizontal bar and pommel horse in the all-around qualification and only moved into the final of the best 24 in ninth place. In the team competition, the Japanese team dropped from silver to fourth place after Uchimura's faulty departure on the last device, again the pommel horse. Only after a protest by the Japanese team management and ten video studies by the referees of the FIG International Gymnastics Federation was Uchimura's pommel horse exercise raised by 0.7 points and the team was downgraded to second place. It was the first time that such a correction had an impact on the Olympic medal decision. Two days later in the all-around final, Uchimura presented himself significantly better. After three out of six rounds he took over the overall lead and did not give it up until the last device. With 92,690 points, Uchimura was Olympic champion ahead of the German Marcel Nguyen (91,031) and the winner of the qualification Danell Leyva (90,698) from the USA. A few days later he won the silver medal in the floor final behind the Chinese defending champion Zou Kai. Uchimura originally qualified fifth on the parallel bars. But since his compatriots Kazuhito and Yūsuke Tanaka were ahead of him in the qualification, he had to forego a participation according to a regulation that provides for a maximum of two final starters per country.

Sixth world title and second Olympic victory in all-around

Uchimura at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro

In the post-Olympic season 2013 Uchimura managed to win the title in the all- around competition in front of his compatriot Ryōhei Katō and the German Fabian Hambüchen for the fourth time in a row at the World Championships held in Antwerp at the beginning of October . A second gold medal followed together with the Chinese Lin Chaopan on bars, while he was able to secure the bronze medal on the floor and on the horizontal bar.

At the 2014 World Gymnastics Championships in Nanning , Uchimura won the all-around world championship for the fifth time in a row. In the high bar final he finished second behind Epke Zonderland . At the 2015 World Gymnastics Championships in Glasgow , Uchimura became world champion in all-around for the sixth time in a row. In addition, he won the gold medal with the Japanese team in the all-around competition and in the device finals on the horizontal bar.

At the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro , Uchimura was first Olympic champion in the team all-around competition together with Ryōhei Katō , Kenzō Shirai , Yūsuke Tanaka and Koji Yamamuro . The two days later, he reached the individual all-around as the second best in the qualification, behind the Ukrainian Oleh Wernjajew . Vernyaev led to the last device, the horizontal bar, in front of Uchimura. There the Japanese managed to distance his Ukrainian opponents by one point and defend his Olympic victory in London with 92.365 points by 0.099 points against Vernyayev (92.266 points). So Uchimura remained unbeaten in major championships in the individual all-around for seven years and lined up alongside Alberto Braglia (1908 and 1912), Wiktor Tschukarin (1952 and 1956) and Sawao Katō (1968 and 1972), who were also able to repeat their Olympic victories in the all-around. For the device finals in Rio de Janeiro he could only qualify on the ground, where he finished fifth with 15.241 points in the victory of the British Max Whitlock (15.633 points).

Private life

Uchimura at the 2016 Olympics

Kōhei Uchimura, who counted the Japanese gymnast Kōji Gushiken among his models, lives in Saitama . He graduated from the private Nippon Sport Science University (NSSU) in March 2011 and started as an employee at Konami Sports & Life . There he belongs to the company gymnastics team. Uchimura has been married since the end of 2012 and has two daughters, whose names he withheld from the media. He counts reading historical books as one of his hobbies.

Web links

Commons : Kōhei Uchimura  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Kōhei Uchimura in the database of the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (English)
• Profile ( memento from October 11, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) at nbcolympics.com (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Kōhei Uchimura in the database of the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (English) (accessed on August 11, 2016).
2. ↑ Lisa Katayama: Superfly. In: The New York Times . July 22, 2012, p. 34.
3. ↑ 石川雅 彦 : 寝 起 き し て い る す ぐ 横 に 体操 器具 が あ っ た . In: Asahi Shimbun. January 12, 2010. Retrieved August 1, 2012 (Japanese). 
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Sandra Schmidt: Last of the lightness. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . August 1, 2012, p. 9.
5. ↑ ^{a b c} profile ( memento of October 11, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) at nbcolympics.com (English; accessed on August 1, 2012).
6. ↑ Emma John: Olympics: London 2012: Uchimura chases perfection in arena where 'you can't ever be perfect'. In: The Guardian . July 14, 2012, p. 7.
7. ↑ ^{a b} Profile ( memento from January 3, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) at london2012.com (English; accessed on August 1, 2012).
8. ↑ ^{a b c} Yoree Koh, Geoffrey A. Fowler: Uchimura Mixes Strength and Beauty. at wsj.com, July 29, 2012 (accessed August 1, 2012).
9. ↑ Katja Sturm: Nothing to disturb you. In: Frankfurter Rundschau. October 17, 2009, p. 30.
10. ↑ Ayako Murao: Uchimura Wins Japanese Title at intlgymnast.com (accessed August 1, 2012).
11. ↑ ^{a b c} AFP : Olympics: Uchimura targets ultimate performance in London . July 20, 2012, 11:01 PM GMT (accessed via LexisNexis Economy ).
12. ^ David Wiederkehr: Idol, title guarantee, record hunter. In: Tages-Anzeiger . October 12, 2011, p. 45.
13. ↑ Gerhard Pfisterer: The world champion doesn't care about the World Cup series. In: Stuttgarter Zeitung . November 11, 2011, p. 41.
14. ↑ AFP: Gymnastics: Japan's 'machine' gearing up for perfection . October 15, 2011, 3:45 AM GMT.
15. ↑ Japanese Uchimura was crowned King of Gymnastics. In: Rheinische Post . October 17, 2009 (accessed via LexisNexis Wirtschaft ).
16. ↑ World Gymnastics Association defends controversial decision at morgenpost.de, July 31, 2012 (accessed on August 1, 2012).
17. ↑ Gymnastics at the Olympics: Nguyen wins silver in the all- around competition at Spiegel Online , August 1, 2012 (accessed on August 1, 2012).
18. ↑ Results of the 2014 World Cup, all-around men. fig-gymnastics.com, accessed on October 13, 2014 (PDF, 286 kB).
19. ↑ Competition results World Cup 2014 horizontal bar. fig-gymnastics.com, accessed on October 13, 2014 (PDF, 265 kB).
20. ↑ Kōhei Uchimura. In: International Sports Archive. 24/2016 from June 14, 2016, supplemented by news from MA-Journal up to week 32/2016 (accessed via Munzinger Online ).