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| Eldrew Yulo joined his kuya Carlos as Asian Games medalists. POC Media Pool |
QUEZON CITY—In a recent interview, Gymnastics Association of the Philippines president Cynthia Carrion-Norton expressed confidence in Eldrew Yulo that she even thought he could join his Kuya Caloy as an Asian Games gold medalist.
The younger Yulo came two spots short of Norton's prediction, but he can still be proud that, just like his older brother, he is a podium finisher in Nagoya.
Eldrew capped a historic Philippine men's artistic gymnastics team campaign in the quadrennial meet with a bronze medal in the horizontal bar event on Friday night at the Nippon Gaishi Hall in the Japanese city.
Just like his kuya, though, the younger Yulo had to escape a scare to keep his podium spot.
Hours after Carlos Yulo secured the vault gold after a tight battle against silver medalist Mahdi Olfati that boiled down to the latter's second vault landing, Eldrew secured his podium finish against Milad Karimi in another tight contest that was only decided by revisiting their final scores.
Yulo and Karimi ended up tied for third place with 13.666 points each, but Yulo, who performed first, took the tiebreaker on a better execution score.
Yulo, who opted for a 5.0 difficulty level, tallied 8.566 execution points, while Karimi, whose routine was at 5.8 difficulty, only got 7.766 in execution.
The deciding moment came in Karimi's routine when a huge fall early on turned out to be costly for the Kazakh gymnast, tipped among the top contenders for the event.
Karimi recovered and even planted a perfect landing for a 0.1-point bonus, but it was still not enough to take the medal away from Yulo.
Tian Hao of China won it all with 14.7 points, while host-country contender Shinnosuke Oka took the silver with 14.033.
Only the Yulo Brothers scored medals in the men's artistic gymnastics event, but as a whole, the Philippine team's campaign was a massive success.
Carlos Yulo even had a chance to add another medal to his haul in the parallel bars, but he settled for fourth behind podium finishers Oka (silver), Zou Jingyuan (gold), and Rasuljon Abdurakhimov (bronze).
