Artistic Gymnast wins gold at provincials

Seamus O’Donoughue, a 16 year old Men’s Artistic gymnast who trains at Apollo Gymnastics captured a gold and silver medal representing Northern region at the Provincial Championships held in Burlington last weekend.

O’Donoughue competes in the Provincial Level 4 category and has been working hard all year long to gain some bigger new skills to put him ahead of some of his fellow competitors in terms of difficulty.

“Seamus has been so tough on himself this year”, says Dave Harris, O’Donoughue’s coach at Apollo. “He has been so focused on getting certain skills, like a double back on floor, a huge double back flyaway off high bar and certain others. This meet was his big test for himself and he did very well. I am very impressed”, Harris added.

On floor exercise, Seamus had a perfect 10.0 start value; which means he added a lot of difficulty and bonus skills to his routine. The double back tuck in his first line was very well executed and set the tone for the routine. He finished the routine with a straight-body flip with 2 full twists in it. His goal was to win this event in particular and O’Donoughue walked away with the gold medal for his efforts.

Seamus also received another medal over the weekend, a silver one for his performance on the parallel bars. His final score of 9.10 showed how well he executed the elements he had planned. A dynamic front uprise and a good layout side dismount helped Seamus score so well.

O’Donoughue finished in 4th on high bar with an impressive double back tuck as his dismount. He landed it very well considering he dropped out from about 13 feet above the floor.

Fifth and sixth place awards were also given to Seamus for rings and vault respectively.

“It was a great end to the season for Seamus and I know he’s very pumped up to compete level 6 next season (which is a National level of competition)," stated Harris.

“He will continue working hard as he now has to change his focus a bit and make sure he’s well-prepared for his other competitive sport- Power Tumbling. He has Provincial Championships for tumbling in about 3 weeks, where he’ll join 12 other Apollo athletes in Toronto. Then he’s off to Ottawa to take part in the Canada Cup competition to see if he will be part of the Canadian team to attend World Age-groups being held in the Netherlands in the Fall”.


Submitted to BayToday.ca