Yulo captivates audience with golden performance in Asian gymnastics meet

MANILA, Philippines – “Unbelievable”. “Awesome.”

These were just some of the words that the mesmerized spectators at the OCBC Arena in Singapore spoke after falling under Carlos Yulo’s spell following the Filipino wonder’s magnificent floor exercise triumph in the Asian Artistic Gymnastics Championships Saturday.

Delivering another routine like no other, the pocket-sized dynamo from Leveriza in Manila blew away everyone after, eliciting a scintillating 15.300 score and capturing the gold in his pet event where he first became world champion four years ago in Stuttgart, Germany.

So magical was Yulo’s performance that the closest to him—Kazakhstan’s Dmitriy Patanin — could only muster a 14.366 and another one — Chinese Su Weide — a 14.333 — both good for the silver and bronze, respectively.

Another Filipino, reigning Phnom Penh Southeast Asian Games floor exercise gold medalist John Ivan Cruz, made the eight-man finale but wound up last with an 11.433.

All of them were just completely bedazzled by Yulo.

If this was boxing, it was a first-round knockout.

“I got a text from here saying ‘unbelievable,’ ‘awesome,’” the ecstatic Gymnastics Association of the Philippines president Cynthia Carrion Norton told The STAR. “He was phenomenal with a score of 15.300, no one coming close to him.”

It was the first of the many gold the two-time world champion is trying to scoop up and replicate, if not eclipse, his three-gold, one-silver effort in last year’s edition of this same event in Doha, Qatar.

Yulo, who copped the individual all-around silver the day before, is scheduled to see action in today’s finals in vault and parallel bars where he is the defending champion.

And you could count Yulo to weave his magic again.