Tokyo: Olympic Gymnastics Twice All-Around Champion Kohei Uchimura has retired 33 years old, his management said on Tuesday, ending a career of one of the great sports career.
Uchimura claims gold in the 2012 and 2016 matches, won the Olympic team with Japan in Rio and crowned worldwide champion six times.
But he suffered disappointment at his Swansong Olympics, fell from the horizontal bar and failed to reach the final in the Tokyo match last year.
The last competition Uchimura was in the world championship last October in Kitakyushu, the city where he was born.
He finished sixth in the horizontal bar final but was given a passionate reception by the house crowd after attaching a landing textbook.
He told AFP after the event that he would take the time to consider the next step, but admitted there was a “new generation of appears” in gymnastics.
Respected in Japan, Uchimura is also a favorite of a crowd because of his relaxed personality and love of chocolate.
In the Rio game in 2016 he became headlines by collecting 500,000 yen telephone bills ($ 4,500) playing Pokemon Go.
But he was truly a business when he arrived at the competition, won silver at all-around and the team’s events in the Olympic debut in 2008.
He then became the first man in 44 years to win the Olympic gold again, in 2012 and 2016, and also claimed the title the world every year among them.
But a shoulder injury began to take their victims and in 2019 he described his chances of appearing in the Tokyo game as a “fairy tale”.
He took radical action by dropping every event but a horizontal bar, and proceeded to book his place at the Olympics at his home.
Japanese gymnastics legend Kohei Uchimura retires at 33
