Britain’s male gymnasts missed out on a medal in Monday night’s team final, as Japan staged a superb fightback to snatch gold in a dramatic finale at Paris’s Bercy Arena.
China, heavy favourites to claim their first title since London 2012, had gone into the final piece of apparatus with a three-point lead, but Weide Su twice fell off the high bar to throw the door open to the Japanese, who snuck through to top the podium by a slender margin of just 0.532 of a point.
The British quintet of Max Whitlock, Joe Fraser, Luke Whitehouse, Jake Jarman and Harry Hepworth had qualified third but were overhauled by an inspired USA and finished an agonising fourth for the third Games in a row.
After Andy Murray’s epic and diving silver for Tom Daley, Whitlock was hoping to cap a stellar 24 hours for Team GB’s old guard, the 31-year-old chasing a seventh Olympic medal.
With a team including three Games debutants starting their first final on pommel horse, the apparatus on which Whitlock is two-time reigning champion, there was particular onus on the elder statesman to set the tone.
He did so in good style, a score of 15.266 higher than he or anyone else had managed in qualifying on Saturday and boding well for his attempt at an individual three-peat later in the week.
Unlike in qualifying, when four gymnasts had competed on each discipline and the lowest score wiped, here there was no margin for error, just three to go on every apparatus and everything to count.
Early on, Britain’s novices dovetailed nicely. Hepworth delivered a vital 14.8 on rings, where his teammates are at their weakest. When Whitehouse missed his landing on vault and the sideline fist-pumping threatened briefly to go flat, Jarman, the world champion, picked up the slack with a dazzling response, though the team effort was still a point down on what had been their best apparatus on the Games’s opening day.
At halfway, the Brits sat in the bronze medal position, with China already out in front. Japan, though, having been paired with the Chinese and forecast to push them all the way, were off the pace, hindered by a horrorshow on pommel horse from Daiki Hashimoto, the all-around individual champion in Tokyo and both World Championships since. The 22-year-old would later make amends with a clutch show on the high bar to punish China’s fatal mistake.
Towards the business end we went. Ukraine were magnificent on parallel bars, the Americans pumped in front of a US-heavy crowd as they put qualifying’s demons on the high bar aside. So raucous was the reception for the diminutive Fred Richard’s landing that you wondered whether the Bercy Arena will be able to bear the strain when Simone Biles leads the women’s team out in their own final here tomorrow night.
Suddenly, with two rotations to go, little more than two points covered the top five, Britain at the foot of that pile but firmly in touch. The horizontal bar, though, proved their undoing as Whitlock and Fraser, needing an uplift on their qualifying performances, went the other way.
