By Joey Villar
IN 2018 in Doha, Qatar, Carlos “Caloy” Yulo stood at the podium and shed tears of joy after delivering the Philippines a historic first Artistic Gymnastics World Championships medal — a bronze.
Four years into the present and the diminutive but big-hearted gem from Leveriza, Manila has harvested gold after gold in the international stage like he’s picking grapes from a vineyard.
And the most recent of this mighty conquests by the 22-year-old, three-time world champion came in the Asian Championships held in the exact, same place in the Arab country where plucked two more glittering gold in vault and parallel bars on Saturday night.
The quintuple Southeast Asian Games gold winner was nothing short of spectacular in vault where he registered an average of 14.884 from his two attempts of 14.967 and 14.800 as well in parallel bars where he tallied 15.167 on a degree of difficulty scale of 6.300 and execution score of 8.867.
Mr. Yulo’s splendor reduced the rest of the field in awe of the spectacle they were left to witness and settled for crumbs — a silver and bronze to South Korea’s Kim Hansol and Japan’s Shiga Tachibana in vault and Japan’s Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and China’s Yin Dehang in parallel bars, respectively.
Gymnastics Association of the Philippines (GAP) president Cynthia Carrion, who was in Doha to accompany Mr. Yulo, said the latter could have dominated the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China had it not been postponed due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
“This Asian Championships is the same as the Asian Games because all of the region’s best are here,” Ms. Carrion told The STAR. It capped a glorious performance for Mr. Yulo, who also struck gold in his pet floor exercise on Friday and snared silver in the individual all-around on Thursday.
It also opened the boundless horizon for Mr. Yulo in this year’s World Championships in October in Liverpool, England where he is a heavy favorite not just in floor exercise and vault where he was world titlist in 2019 in Stuttgart, Germany and last year in Ktakyushu, Japan, but also other apparatuses plus the individual all-around.
While Mr. Yulo was expected to reign supreme in vault, there were some doubts if he would perform better in the parallel bars as he came in sixth in the qualifying round on Friday.
That effort costs Mr. Yulo the individual all-around gold that was snatched by Chinese Shi Cong.
But when Mr. Yulo summoned the same force, power and grace in the finale that made him one of the best, if not the best, male gymnasts in the world, there was little doubt of the outcome where the pocket-sized wunderkind stood on top of everyone, received his glimmering medal and sang the national anthem while the country’s flag is being raised.