In the parallel bars and on the barre at the European Championships in Rimini. Great satisfaction for Franco Mantero’s company
European Artistic Gymnastics Championship, the one dedicated to men, and in Ferrara the fans are Italian and also, invariably, for the gymnast Illia Kovtun, a Ukrainian star who has been the standard-bearer of the Ferrara Gymnastics Gymnastics Center for the Italian Team Championship for four years. A golden boy, who became much more than a simple “foreign loan” for the PGF, and for the entire city of Ferrara, when at the beginning of the Russian invasion he became the symbol, together with his coach Iryna Gorbacheva, of the reception network “sports” activated by the club to give him and twenty other compatriots including young gymnasts, coaches and some family members a safe place to live and train in those first months. A life experience that ties together the Champion, his coach and the PGF, as demonstrated on several occasions in recent years, with more or less visible gestures.
And so, returning to Rimini 2024, in Ferrara we could only watch with great attention the apparatus finals scheduled for today, where Kovtun presented himself as a leader on bars and bars after two spectacular tests in the general competition on Wednesday where, unfortunately, he was Only 6th place All-Around arrived, a result below expectations ruined by the floor exercise test.
Parallel bars and bars are the last two tests of the six scheduled and the best eight of the qualifiers have access to the final, for a tight program which sees the two finals take place in just over an hour, including the awards ceremony. We start on the bar where the Ukrainian opens the competition by recording a resounding 15.633, an unattainable score which ultimately leads him to finish almost one point above the second, the Cypriot Marios Georgiou, the winner of the All-Around test. There is just enough time to taste the gold, to see the first tests of the colleagues and then it’s time to vault again, this time on a single “wood”, that of the bar. The score “stops” at 14,600, which leads us to follow with apprehension the exercise of the Lithuanian specialist Robert Tvorogal after him: 14,566. A few cents, but it’s gold again, it’s a European encore for Kovtun!
We are therefore celebrating in Ferrara, with great joy also for the Italian results, from the bronze of Yumin Abbadini in the All-Around to the successes of the juniors of the coach Nicola Costa, who just three weeks ago were guests at the Palagym “Orlando Polmonari”: for first of them a bright silver in the team, then the incredible performance of Tommaso Brugnami who achieved an encore of golds (floor exercise and rings) and took the silver on vault, and the bronze of Manuel Betterera on the bars!
Now we look at the next events, for PGF the Scudetto final in Florence on 25 and 26 May. And, for Illia, after that it will already be time to think about Paris…
