Yulo pockets gold

MANILA, Philippines — Unbelievable. Awesome.

These words best described Filipino wonder Carlos Yulo at the OCBC Arena in Singapore yesterday following a magnificent floor exercise triumph in the Asian Artistic Gymnastics Championships.

Delivering a routine like no other, Yulo blew away the opposition after eliciting a 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 his closest pursuers, Kazakhstan’s Dmitriy Patanin, could only muster a 14.366 and China’s Su Weide a 14.333 for the silver and bronze, respectively.

But while he was the floor general, Yulo wasn’t the lord of the rings and wound up fourth with a 14.033 in the event topped by Chinese Lan Xingyu, who had a 15.200.

Vietnam’s Nguyen Van Khanh Phong and Hong Kong’s Ng Kiu Chung snatched the silver and bronze with a 14.366 and 14.100.

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.

In women’s section, Aleah Finnegan pocketed the floor exercise bronze with a 13.483. Korean Yeo Seojeong took the mint with a 13.517 while Uzbek Oksana Chusovitina the silver with a 13.517.

Still all of them were completely bedazzled by Yulo. If this was boxing, it was a first-round knockout.

“I got a text from here saying ‘unbelievable, awesome,’” Gymnastics Association of the Philippines president Cynthia Carrion Norton told The STAR. “He was phenomenal.”

The two-time world champion who’s following the road to the 2024 Paris Olympics is trying to replicate, if not eclipse, his three-gold, one-silver effort in last year’s edition 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.