In grabbing the gold in this year’s Asian Games in Nagoya, Japan, Filipino gymnast Carlos Yulo compared his top podium finish with his the jubilation he felt when he triumphed in the Paris Olympics in 2024.
“It’s like winning Olympics,” Yulo blurted after bagging the first gold medal for the Philippines in the floor exercise, beating all odds from the region’s best in the premier continental sports event.
Yulo’s victory was elevated by redemption after he buried his dismal performance in 2028 at the 18th Asiad in Jakarta, Indonesia.
The only Filipino to win two Olympic gold medals, the 26-year-old Yulo has added another major title to his collection with a score of 14.666 at the Nagoya City General Gymnasium, edging Kazakh runner-up Milad Karimi (14.600) and Japan’s bronze-medal winner Shoma Tsukiyama (14.566) in the tightest of podium rivalries.
The win came eight years after he missed out on the medals in his only previous Asian Games performance in Indonesia when he fell in a tumbling pass and crashed to seventh after being the top qualifier for the floor final.
“This medal, it’s like winning the Olympics, also because it’s kind of the same back when I was 18 years old, at the 2018 Jakarta Asian Games,” he enthused.
“I kind of messed up my routine there. I was a finalist on floor and vault, but it wasn’t really a good performance.
“And at the same time in Tokyo Olympics, it’s kind of the same. It was really messed up,” he recalled in his failure to qualify for the floor final at those Games.
“It’s really a good story, and I feel like I redeemed it in this competition.”
Yulo has come a long way since those setbacks, becoming the Philippines’ first Olympic gymnastics champion when he won the floor title at Paris 2024 before adding a second gold in vault.
