International Gymnast

“[My father] just told me to enjoy the sport, and that if I can’t enjoy it, it means nothing. I think this was very good for me.”

THOUGH he easily won the world all-around gold last October in London, Kohei Uchimura may be the only one who is not con- vinced there will be more such titles in his future. And that is not o say he lacks confidence, but more that he believes the past is history. Asked if he can sweep the major all-around titles through the 2012

Olympics, the nimble Nagasaki native answers as if he’d never won anything.

“I don’t think I can,” he told IG. “I have completely forgotten that I was champion.” ¶ It may have been a bold question, but would anyone really be shocked if Uchimura dominates this entire quadrennium? In London he competed at his own level. And even with a mistake on parallel bars, where he took an intermediate swing, he still scored 2.575 clear of runner-up Daniel Keatings of Great Britain. By contrast, Bridget Sloan won the women’s all-around by .05.

Uchimura was visibly thrilled to win his first
world title, but that glitch on p-bars repre-
sented a loss against himself. When asked
how he rated his London performance on a
scale from 1-100, Uchimura answered
emphatically, “50!”
Perhaps Uchimura’s strict standards were
galvanized by the Japanese legends that pre-
ceded him. As a young teenager, he looked
up to Naoya Tsukahara, son of Japanese
icon Mitsuo Tsukahara. “He is my gymnas-
tics role model,” Uchimura says. “When I
was 15, I decided to move to his gym in
Tokyo from my parents’ gym in Nagasaki.”
That meant leaving his former-gymnast
father, Kazuhisa, and mother, Shuko, for
more intense training at Nippon Sport
Science University, where he is now coached
by two-time Olympian Yoshiaki Hatakeda
(1992, ’96).

It wasn’t an easy transition. After competing in a national competition during his final year of junior high school, Uchimura was impressed by his stronger competitors. “I wanted to be like them, to be a better gymnast, and made the decision to go to Tokyo,” says Uchimura, whose younger sister, Haruhi, also is a gymnast.

Mother and father were not so sure it was
the right move. “At first they were against
me, but I was a child that never listens to
somebody once I made up my mind firmly,”
Uchimura says. “So in the end, they said OK,
reluctantly.”
Uchimura says he appreciates the respect
his parents showed him by letting him move.
He also remembers how fortunate he was to
grow up with a gym as his playground.

“Since it started as playing, the feeling that gymnastics is interesting and fun has rooted in me,” he says. “That’s why I still think I want to always enjoy doing gymnastics.”

Credit Dad for not pushing his talented son in
the family business. “He wasn’t like that,”
Uchimura says. “No hard words or anything. He
just told me to enjoy the sport, and that if I can’t
enjoy it, it means nothing. I think this was very
good for me.”
And today, Uchimura is good—no, great—for
a sport which at times can be confused with a cir-
cus. For example, the 5-foot- 3, 116-pound phe-
nom placed only sixth on high bar at the London
worlds, but he showed the cleanest perform-
ance, technically and aesthetically, of the final.

Uchimura is diplomatic, to a certain point, when asked if the men’s Code is missing the boat right now in terms of rewarding the best gymnastics. “I don’t think the Code is wrong, but I would have liked to have had a higher score [on high