After a particularly nerve-wracking day, Artem Dolgopyat qualified on Saturday for the gymnastics finals at the Paris Olympics and will try to retain the title he won in Tokyo in 2021, after finishing in seventh place in the qualifying stage.
The 27-year-old Dolgopyat made two notable mistakes during the exercise, the first in the second acrobatic bar when he bent his knees, slipped and was not far from falling, and the second in the third bar when he messed up his landing. The score was lower than what he is used to: 14.466, turning the semi-finals into a stroke of luck. Luck favors the good and Dolgopyat slid into the finals thanks to circumstances due to circumstances not in his control.
Dolgopyat finished in third place at the end of the first qualifying round. In the second round, none of the members of the Japanese team achieved a better result. However, the Chinese Zhang Boheng finished with 14.466 points (like Dolgopyat), but came on top thanks to the tiebreaker, dropping Dolgopyat to sixth place.
In the third group, in which 24 gymnasts take part, Dolgopyat's runner-up from Tokyo - the Spanish Rayderley Zapata overtook him and dropped him to the seventh place overall. Fortunately for the Israeli gymnast, the Italian or Swiss gymnasts' teams did not score better.
After the exercise, Dolgopyat said: "The feeling is not so good, but let's hope for the best and that it will be enough. The score is a little too low, but it is possible. I don't know what happened, great excitement. I almost fell in the second bar, but overall it was a reasonable performance and that's why I got a relatively good score. I'm a little upset, but there's little chance I'll make it to the finals. That's life. Fate will decide if I make it, mainly because of the leg injury."
Dolgopyat arrived in Paris after a difficult year, during which he suffered an Achilles tendon injury that still weighs him down. He also feels immense pressure to defend his title. In addition to being an Olympic champion, he is also a world champion (since October 7, 2023) and a two-time European champion in the floor exercise.