A superb week of gymnastics at the magnificent o2 Arena in London was capped of in style today (18/10) with a Gold medal for Britain’s Beth Tweddle.
Beth has been used to having two finals to focus her attention on in recent years – bars and floor. This time the floor exercise was her only hope of securing a medal for team GB in the women’s competition.
The atmosphere picked up several notches from what we have experienced so far during the women’s competition with every member of the audience clapping along to Beth’s music. She hit her tumbles – one and a half walk out to double Arabian, piked double Arabian, two and a half immediate punch straight front full (stuck cold) with entertaining dance and very well extended leaps and jumps. With the highest difficulty score of the finalists and knowing her execution score is generally good Beth was on track for a good total – 14.65 put her firmly in the driving seat and took her to GOLD.
Beth’s Gold follows the sensational All Around Silver medal achieved by Daniel Keatings earlier in the week, the first ever All Around medal for a British Gymnast at a World Championships.
Beth Tweddle
I am absolutely over the moon. It was tough earlier on in the week, I missed out on the bars final but I knew there would be a silver lining and I nailed it. I knew the Russian and Lauren Mitchell from Australia were strong and it was nerve wracking watching their routines. The British crowd has really helped; earlier in the week after my bars routine there were kids in the O2 coming up and saying they still thought I was the best and that really brought me up. Since qualifications I have been shopping, chilled out and spent time with my family. Everybody knows me for bars but floor has always been there or thereabouts so this win feels amazing. It’s been emotional, there’s been ups and downs, I was never known as a floor worker when I was younger so it feels fantastic.(END)
Tim Jones, Olympic Performance Director for British Gymnastics.
We are extremely pleased with the efforts of our gymnasts this week. They have all enjoyed an important and positive experience; important in that we have all had a valuable insight into the challenges of competing on home soil, and positive in the medals and finals we have returned.
I am happy that we are continuing to make strong progress, and building year on year. We are now a nation that has moved from producing an occasional finalist, to one which is considered to be a major player, consistently producing finalists and medallists. We know that we have tremendous potential and could have achieved even more at these Championships; our challenge for the future will be in converting this obvious potential into hard results.
We feel that we can still make considerable progress, and have many areas to work on. But by continuing to build on our excellent coaching base, and being open minded enough to add best practice from other sports, we believe we can go from strength to strength. (END)
The event brought together gymnasts from over 70 Nations over 6 days of competition. Americas Bridget Sloan took the coveted Women’s All Around title in dramatic fashion from teammate Rebecca Bross.
The apparatus Finals were a battle between the American and Chinese Teams for the majority of the medals
For full reports, quotes and results please see www.british-gymnastics.org
