OLYMPICS/Bronze-winning gymnast Tang Chia-hung reflects on unlikely medal

Taipei/Paris, Aug. 6 (CNA) When Taiwanese gymnast Tang Chia-hung (唐嘉鴻) fell to the ground during the horizontal bar event at the Paris Olympics on Monday, he thought his chances to win a medal were gone.

"But I managed to refocus. I wanted to finish the routine and let the world see that Taiwan has such great athletes," Tang told CNA.

Yet, with six of the eight finalists shockingly either failing to catch the bar during their routines or falling to the mat on their dismounts, Tang's score of 13.966 turned out to be good enough for a tie for third place with China's Zhang Boheng (張博恆).

Nicknamed Taiwan's "King of Cats" for his forte Yamawaki move, or vertical "cat jump," Tang was the first of the finalists to perform in the horizontal bar event Monday.

An audible gasp could be heard in the Bercy Arena in Paris when Tang fell to the mat on the first big move of his routine.

But the Taiwanese gymnast quickly got back on his feet to the crowd's applause and returned to the bar with a smile on his face.

"Actually, I didn't think too much about it," Tang told CNA. "I just wanted to prove that my past efforts were not in vain."

Watching from just a few steps away, Tang's club coach Weng Shih-hang (翁士航) said he felt his "heart ache" when the gymnast failed the early release and catch.

But when Tang quickly stood back up and went on to complete his routine, Weng felt proud of the athlete he has been working with for more than a decade.

"In my heart, that already deserved a gold medal," the coach said.

The disappointed gymnast wept in his coach's arms after completing his imperfect routine, which Tang attributed to "releasing stress" since he could "finally relax."

To the 27-year-old gymnast's surprise, however, of the remaining seven competitors, all of them stumbled except for Shinnosuke Oka of Japan and Angel Barajas of Colombia, keeping Tang in the competition.

Tang said that as he watched his peers make major mistakes of their own, he wondered: "What's going on here?"

In the end, both Taiwan's Tang and China's Zhang scored a 6.5 for difficulty and 7.466 for execution, leaving them 0.567 points behind the 14.533 scored by both Japan's Oka and Columbia's Barajas, who won gold and silver, respectively.

The "King of Cats" secured another bronze for Team Taiwan due to the unexpected turn of events, raising Taiwan's medal count at Paris 2024 to one gold and three bronzes as of Tuesday.

"This shows that no one should give up until the very last moment," Weng told CNA. "If we hadn't finished or had just gone through the motions after that failed move, then there's no way we could have won a bronze medal."

Tang is no stranger to adversity. In February 2023, he suffered a torn left Achilles tendon during a simulated competition at the National Training Center in Kaohsiung, causing him to miss the 2023 World Championships and the Asian Games, according to the official website of the Paris 2024 Olympics.

Recovery from the serious injury took around six months, according to the gymnast. So clinching a bronze at Paris 2024 in Tang's mind felt like "rising up from the ashes," he said.

Since 2022, Tang has been steadily increasing the degree of difficulty of his routines, and Weng felt the gymnast's best is yet to come.

The gymnast's coach told CNA he expected to transform Tang from the "Asian King of Cats" to the "World King of Cats" and take Tang's Yamawaki move to the next level.

The goal, he said, was to create "a whole new Tang Chia-hung" by the 2027 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, which will also be a qualifying event for the 2028 Olympics.

Tang seemed to share his coach's ambitions.

"Although I only came away with the bronze medal in this Olympics, this is just the beginning," he told CNA. "I will become a better Tang Chia-hung, get more experience, and then get the best result in the next Olympics."

(By James Thompson and Li Chien-chung) enditem/ls