Carlos Yulo

A quick perspective: His benchmark double-gold are only the first individual Olympic medals ever won by a Philippine men’s gymnast. Ever.

Days after dynamo Carlos Yulo literally somersaulted into history at the 2024 Paris Olympics, we often slap our foreheads with that historic sporting fact, if only to keep it together amid all the hyperventilating, frenzied patriotic gushing.

Ordinarily, we would heartily celebrate by putting Yulo in the stratosphere of the Filipino Olympic tradition, where all true Filipino sporting legends belong. Yulo certainly more than deserves the distinction.

Confessedly, however, when most of us are hardly conversant with his sport it can be hard to understand how suddenly everything gymnastic gets so big for us. Who would have thought?

But 24-year-old, 4’11” Yulo thought it, dreamt it. And finally did it in back-to-back style at the Bercy Arena in Paris.

And by nerve-wracking margins too: 0.034 of a point above Israel’s Artem Dolgopyat in the men’s floor exercise final and 0.15 point above Armenia’s Artur Davtyan in the vault final.

“I did not hesitate. I just went for it,” Yulo said of his flawless signature routines in the elite level of gymnastic competitions.

By now, Yulo’s Olympic triumphs have provoked the proverbial “victory has a thousand fathers” malaise, including hypocritical paeans from sports officials and politicians whose fixation with the basketball court remains an unparalleled stupidity.

But Yulo’s Olympic glory comes down only to him, no one else. His struggles, breakthroughs, and heartbreaks are all about him digging deep into himself in a sport he is truly passionate about.

Yulo’s Olympic fairy tale journey stands as a testimony to the “start them young” sports program. But he, like any other young aspiring Filipino athlete hungry for local support and opportunities, had to scoot elsewhere and called Japan home for seven straight years.

Molded by Japanese coach Munihiro Kugimiya to superstar specifications, Yulo debuted at the Tokyo Olympic Games four years ago after a history-making gold medal on the floor exercise at the 2019 World Championships in Stuttgart, Germany.

But for all his promise, Yulo was denied success at Tokyo, suffering the cruel indignity of finishing fourth.

Since his Olympic debut, he had mixed results in gymnastics. While he won four medals in the 2021 and 2022 Worlds, he went home empty handed from the 2023 World Championships.

Soon after, Yulo and his coach Kugiyama amicably parted, leaving him coach-less less than five months into the lead-up to the Paris Games.

At the same time, personal and financial issues grabbed the Manila native by the throat, with scandalous reports of estranged relationships with some family members and the shenanigans of his management group.

For all his travails, Yulo could have been undone but he persisted. He ably bounced back, largely with the help of the close-knit global gymnastics community that opened their training facilities to him.

Subsequently, reported a sportswriter, Yulo embarked on an adventure of “dropping into gymnasiums around the world with athletes of similar caliber, eking out training tips from them at each stopover.”

Last February he trained at the South Korea gym of Tokyo 2020 Olympian Lee Junho and later at the British gymnastics center at Lilleshall, training alongside Paris Games bronze medalist Jake Jarman.

Speaking of his unorthodox training, Yulo said he had no choice since “the facilities in the Philippines are not for high-level athletes.”

Moreover, Yulo said that on his own he “discovered new skills” that he thought he could pull off in Paris. Amazingly, he did exactly that.

Yulo’s relatively unpublicized brief training sessions with his fellow world-caliber gymnasts obviously aided his legendary stature.

In the months ahead, Yulo’s stature will surely translate to a boom in Philippine gymnastics.

But if Philippine gymnastics’ takeoff and vault are looking great because of Yulo, let’s not lose the momentum. So that when future Filipino gymnasts stick the landing after their routines in future Olympic Games they will have nowhere else to go but up to the podium.