For Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai, his skillful performance of the challenging “Thomas flair” on the pommel horse at the Tokyo Olympics only made him want to perfect the routine further.
The 25-year-old won a silver medal in the pommel horse on Sunday, the first Olympic medal ever won by a Taiwanese athlete in gymnastics.
He nailed his 45-second routine, centered around the move named after late US gymnast Kurt Thomas, in which he skillfully maneuvered around the pommel horse on alternate hands while swinging his split legs in a continuous circular motion.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Yet the score it earned — 15.400 — was not good enough to prevent the UK’s Max Whitlock from winning his second consecutive Olympic pommel horse gold medal with a score of 15.583.
Lee’s 8.700 for execution was the best of any gymnast, even better than Whitlock’s 8.583, but his 6.7 for difficulty was 0.3 points lower than Whitlock’s 7.0.
“I did my best. I have no regrets,” Lee said after his performance. “Right now, I’m the 3.0 version of Lee Chih-kai, and I’ll push to evolve further by beating Whitlock.”
The defeat of the veteran champion would be the birth of “Lee Chih-kai 4.0,” he said, adding that he aims to achieve a Thomas flair maneuver the world has never seen.
As with any gymnast, Lee’s road to the Olympics has been rife with injuries, muscle pulls and general aches, evidenced by the tape covering several parts of his body.
There have also been tears, as seen in an award-winning 2005 documentary, Jump! Boy, featuring seven young gymnasts training in Yilan County, including Lee.
Recalling his more than a decade of training, Lee described the grind of repeating the same routines every day as “boring and demanding.”
However, it is his ability to endure that routine that has set him apart, he said.
“I’m not talented. I just grind more than others,” Lee said.
Born in 1996 in Yilan, Lee started gymnastics at the age of six, coached by Lin Yu-hsin, who is also the coach of Taiwan’s gymnastics team at the Tokyo Olympics.
Lee joined the gymnastics team of Gongzheng Elementary School in Luodong Township (羅東) when he started there as a first grader.
At first, training was not painful, he said, attributing his fondness for the sport to the “sense of achievement” he felt when a new move drew applause.
However, as the training got harder and more serious, physical and mental pain set in.
He and his teammates occasionally shed tears on a big pillar in front of the gym at the school, Lee said, adding that he would hug that pillar crying whenever his mother sent him to train.
He would actually pray that his mother would take him home because she could not bear to see her son in pain, but that never happened, he said.
Despite thinking of quitting the sport several times because of the pain, the harsh training regimen and the sense of frustration that came after failing to execute a routine well, he pressed on.
Lee was 20 years old when he competed in his first Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. There, he fell from the pommel horse, and at that moment “my brain went blank, except for the thought of wondering why my life was so painful,” he said.
In 2018, he completed a Thomas flair routine to win gold at the Asian Games in Jakarta, and he also bagged a gold in the pommel horse at the 2017 Taipei Summer Universiade and the 2019 Napoli Summer Universiade.
From the 1.0 version of Lee Chih-kai in Rio and 2.0 in Napoli to 3.0 in Tokyo, he has steadily improved, and earning an Olympic medal has only pushed him to strive harder.
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