Max Whitlock safely negotiated pommel qualifying in Tokyo

British gymnast Max Whitlock, 28, will next be in action at the Tokyo Olympics in the final of the men’s pommel horse on Sunday 1 August.

Whitlock – a five-time Olympic medallist from Hemel Hempstead – and his teammates Joe Fraser, James Hall and Giarnni Regini-Moran previously finished a respectable fourth in the men’s team artistic gymnastics final on Monday 26 July in the Ariake Gymnastics Centre.

Team GB qualified for the team final on Day One of the Games on Saturday, with Whitlock contributing in the pommel, parallel bars and horizontal bar, placing fourth overall after two subdivisions had finished their rotation, with Fraser, Regini-Moran and Hall adding to the overall scores.

Whitlock also held his nerve to finish third in qualifying for the solo pommel horse – behind Ireland’s Rhys McClenaghan – as Japanese great Kohei Uchimura crashed out.

The Team GB athlete scored 14.900, some way off his gold-winning 15.966 performance in Rio five years ago, which he will have to improve on to repeat his success in the final of that discipline.

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“I can say on behalf of every gymnast that qualification is the hardest and most nerve-racking thing ever, because everything rides on it,” he reflected afterwards.

“If you muck things up, that’s your Olympics done, and if you don’t you can go on and have more opportunities to compete in that arena.

“We all felt that. It was a bit quieter at breakfast this morning and you could feel that it was competition day. But we’ve come out here and I feel like we’ve delivered. After everything we’ve been through, to come out and do what we’ve done, we should be really pleased.”

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