Ukrainian gymnast Illia Kovtun takes silver medal at 2024 Olympics

Ukrainian gymnast Illia Kovtun has won silver at the 2024 Olympic Games in the parallel bars. Illia, 20, who is from the city of Cherkasy in Ukraine's centre, has earned 15,500 points for his performance. Source: Champion, a sports news platform within Ukrainska Pravda's holding company

Details: Another Ukrainian gymnast, Oleh Verniaiev, fell off the apparatus in the middle of the programme and lost a lot of points, resulting in a total score of 13,300.

Zou Jingyuan of China secured the gold medal with a score of 16,200 points after delivering a flawless performance. Jingyuan, the Olympic champion on the parallel bars from Tokyo 2020, also won silver in the rings exercise at Paris 2024. Additionally, he has two team competition medals: bronze from Tokyo and silver from Paris.

Shinnosuke Oka of Japan, a two-time Olympic champion, won the bronze medal. The Japanese gymnast previously secured gold in Paris 2024 in both the team championship and the individual all-around. This Olympics is now over for Verniaiev and Kovtun.

Both gymnasts failed to reach the finals in the uneven bars.

Background: Earlier, Kovtun placed fourth in the all-around, the most prestigious event in artistic gymnastics, narrowly missing a bronze medal by just 0.2 points. He also finished fourth in the floor exercise. This is Kovtun's second Olympic Games.

The 20-year-old gymnast placed seventh in the team championship at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics (held in 2021) and was eleventh in the individual all-around. The Cherkasy native is a two-time World Championships medalist, winning silver in 2023 in Antwerp, Belgium, and bronze in 2021 in Kitakyushu, Japan. Previously, Verniaiev placed eighth in the individual all-around and fifth in the pommel horse.

Verniaiev is a two-time Olympic medallist, winning gold on the parallel bars and silver in the all-around at Rio 2016. The Donetsk native is also a multiple medallist at the World Championships, including a gold medal on the parallel bars in Nanning, China, in 2014. Earlier, the Ukrainian men's team of Radomyr Stelmakh, Nazar Chepurnyi, Oleh Verniaiev and Illia Kovtun took 5th place in the team all-around with a score of 254.761 points.

Chepurnyi and gymnast Ihor Radivilov also performed in the vault, with the Ukrainians taking sixth and eighth place respectively.

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