From Breaking Barriers to Setting the Bars to Gold
For the young champ in the field of gymnastics, his success is built on a foundation of hard work and patience. He said during an interview with ABS-CBN that not everyone wins and not everyone loses all the time. One must keep going, and thank God, for he’s the real provider of blessings.
The 21-year-old, Carlos “Caloy” Edriel Yulo, is not just an ordinary Filipino athlete like the way many people think he is. He is a one in a million athlete that serves as an embodiment of a phenomenal artistic gymnast that never fails to bring pride and inspire us.
He rose to fame after winning the Philippines’ first-ever gold medal at the World Championships, and he left an indelible mark on the history of his country.
He is known to be the “King of the Floor Exercises”—the master, as everyone says when referring to him. Diversions of him doing tumbling as a child have now become a mark imprinted in the field of artistic gymnastics.
His gymnastics career started at the age of seven. He was brought to the gym for the first time by his grandfather, and he described it as a prepossessing jungle and forest, with which he was impressed upon seeing it, and it triggered something inside him that he wanted to pursue gymnastics.
He was able to showcase his astonishing tumbling skills, and he was recognized for having potential in the field of gymnastics. With the motivation brought by the people who knew he had a future in gymnastics, he started training. A man with so much potential, he managed to get support from the Gymnastics Association of the Philippines to attend his secondary education at Adamson University in Ermita. Also, with his undeniable finesse and passion for gymnastics, it did not end there. He was able to get a Japanese scholarship from the Japan Olympic Association in the year 2016, too.
Yulo and his Japanese coach, Munehiro “Mune” Kugimiya, flew off to Japan to train harder in the year 2017. While honing this young athlete to be one of the best, he encountered a language barrier that proved to be a problem, enabling him to effectively interact with everyone. He also felt homesick, which made the situation somehow worse for him.
He came to a certain point in his career when he wanted to give up, and even told his mom that he was already exhausted. His mom, wanting the best for her son, is ready to support whatever decision he may come up with. Hence, as a turning point, she told him that all of his hard work would be put to waste if he chose to give up.
He competed for the second time at the World Championships, where he astoundingly fought for the gold in his floor exercise. Who would have thought that this would become the most tremendous history of all in Yulo’s career?
Yulo was not expecting that he would win the gold since his opponents were unquestionably proficient and had such a high score that he didn’t think it would be possible for him to outshine them. But, with him doing the best of the best that he could, showing the world his smashing and pulchritudinous skills, he did what he unexpectedly thought he could.
In this current year, during his training, two months before the World Championships, Yulo had an accident on the high bar that injured his elbows, and he couldn’t straighten them for three weeks. Because of it, he was forced to compete only in three events; floor exercises, vault, and parallel bars.
Recently, in the month of October, Yulo failed to defend his world title in the floor exercise, his pet event, because of how he was deducted 0.300 penalty for landing out of bounds during the routine that caused him to miss a podium finish in this event. Despite him not being able to win on the floor exercise, he accepted it and said that a result is a result. No one can control it, and this did not become a hindrance to him continuing to fight in the two other events.
Climbing his way back to the top, Yulo then made history by becoming world champion on the vault and winning silver on the parallel bars, which he had not expected to happen, making him the first Filipino to win multiple medals at the World Championships.
The gymnastics career of Carlos Yulo was not only built on him having to bag a medal at every competition he entered but also on those times he failed to get one and wanted to give up. He was shaped to be this gymnast who is the quintessence of an athlete and a person who knows how to always stand up and fight with power and determination, despite having those times he failed, lost, and fell.
