The beginning of the twelfth edition of the World Cup in gymnastics – DOBRO World Cup Osijek 2021 starts soon, and in the fight for medals the Croatian gymnastics team will be joined by international gymnastics stars and medal winners at the most important European and world gymnastics competitions.
Igor Radivilov (Ukraine)
Full name Igor Vitaliyovych Radivilov, born October 19, 1992. Along with Oleg Vernyayev, he belongs among the greatest Ukrainian gymnasts nowadays and currently is the absolute ruler of the Vault in Europe. He is the current European champion from Basel this year, where he defended the gold won only four months earlier in Mersin. He owns as many as 11 medals from European championships. In Mersin, he participated in winning the team gold. Excellent in the Vault, but also superb on the Rings. Among the four European gold medals won, there is also one won on the Rings back in Moscow in 2013. He also owns two silver and bronze medals from the World Championships and a bronze medal from the London Olympics. His Vault with the highest weight score of as much as 7.0, which he performed at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, was later recognized as “Radivilov”. But the Vault was later banned by the FIG and completely excluded from the ordinance due to excessive risk of injury.
Marian Dragulescu (Romania)
If Igor Radivilov rules the present of the Vault, then definitely Romanian Marian Dragulescu has marked European and world competitions in the Vault for the past two decades. At age 41 (born December 18, 1980) he is still active. He became the European champion for the first time in Bremen in 2000 (Floor), and a year later, at the World Championships in Ghent, he won the world champion titles on the Floor and on the Vault. He was a European champion ten times and a world champion eight times, and from the Olympic Games so far he has won silver (Floor) and two bronze medals (Vault and team) since the 2004 in Athens. Dragulescu’s last name is also forever inscribed in gymnastics history. An extremely hard element on the Vault with two and a half somersaults and a half turn of 180 degrees on landing bears his last name. It is interesting that in 2015, he reported the element “Dragulescu 2”, which makes him unique. Although he is not in his best gymnastic years and despite the fact that he withdrew from gymnastics several times, and then successfully returned, Dragulescu certainly is not “outdated”. Maybe he will show it in Osijek as well.
Andrej Medvedev (Israel)
Igor Radivilov and Marian Dragulescu will have serious competition for the first place in the Vault discipline in Osijek, and that is Andrej Medvedev. An Israeli national team player born on April 6, 1990 in the Russian city of Ulyanovsk, where he started training gymnastics. He moved to Israel with his parents when he was 12 years old. He is one of the great students of Sergei Weisburg. He is the current European runner-up in the Vault from Basel this year, and in 2019 he achieved the same result at the European Championships in Szczecin, Poland. He has already won medals in Osijek, in 2017 he was third, and a year later in the sports arena Gradski vrt he won gold medal on the Vault.
Artem Dolgopyat i Alexander Shatilov (Israel)
Great gymnasts whose life story is very similar to Medvedev, and common to all three is head coach Andri Sergei Weisburg. Osijek and the sports arena Gradski vrt are very familiar to them. Alexander Shatilov is one of the most experienced Floor gymnast, he performed at the first World Cup in Osijek in 2009, when as the current bronze winner at the World Championships in London and the European Championships in Milan the same year, he also won third place in the Gradski vrt. More successful at that time were the golden Brazilian Diego Hypolito and the local gymnast Tomislav Markovic. Shatilov was born on March 22, 1987 in Tashkent (today’s Uzbekistan). At the age of 15, he emigrated with his parents to Israel. He is one of the highest gymnasts in the world series. 183 centimeters tall, and apart from Floor, he competes in the World Cup competitions on the Rings and Horizontal bar. Still, he achieved the greatest results in the biggest competitions on the Floor. Winner of as many as seven medals at the European Championships, he gilded in Moscow in 2013, and won two bronzes at the World Championships in London in 2009 and Tokyo in 2011.
Artem Dolgopyat, the youngest of the “three kings of Israel” was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine on July 16, 1997. His father was also a gymnast, and the family decided to move to Israel when he was 12, as they were of Jewish descent. A great Floor gymnast with two world silver medals (Montreal 2017 and Stuttgart 2019) and four medals from the European Championships, of which the gold was won in Mersin in 2020, when our Osijek resident Aurel Benović won the silver medal. Recently, in Varna, Benović retaliated somewise against Dolgopyat, which is coming to Osijek as a defender of gold from the last DOBRO World Cup in 2019. We believe that this year in the sports arena Gradski vrt we will watch a duel of two Floor gymnasts that will mark the world gymnastics scene in the years to come.
Ibrahim Colak (Turkey)
Turkish gymnastics has experienced a great expansion in recent years, and one of the leaders of the latest Turkish “gymnastics revolution” is Ibrahim Colak. Born on January 7, 1995 in Izmir, more precisely in its part of the Konak, a word that is certainly very well known to us. Namely, Konak in Turkish means lodging. He certainly did not “sleep on laurels” even when he won silver at the Mediterranean Games in Mersin in 2013, which was the first gymnastic medal for his country in that competition. Mersin also hosted the 2020 European Championship. The first competition in the post-covid period. At home, Colak again won the title of European champion on the Rings, and he also added silver in the team competition. He will try to win an Olympic medal in Tokyo this summer. He belongs to the narrow circle of candidates. After all, at the 2019 World Championships in Stuttgart, which was a qualification for the Olympics, he won the world title. This is also the best result in his career so far. From Mersin to Mersin, he also won individual silver at the European Championships in Glasgow and bronze at the European Games in Baku in 2015. We can rightly call him the “Turkish lord of the Rings”. In Osijek, his serious competitors on the Rings will be Italian Salvatore Maresca, bronze medalist from this year’s EC in Basel and Austrian Vinzenz Hoeck, silver medalist from Mersin 2020.
Ferhat Arican (Turkey)
Turkish gymnast who participated in winning the European team silver at his home field in Mersin in 2020.. In addition, Ferhat Arican is a great gymnast on the Rings. Arican (born July 28, 1993) is a two-time consecutive European champion on the Rings. He triumphed on the Rings in both Mersin and Basel this year. In Mersin he completed a collection of medals by winning bronze on the Pommel horse. Then our Filip Ude won the silver, and by only three hundredths he was better than the other Croatian Robert Seligman, who then took the fourth place.
Robert Tvorogal (Lithuania)
The Lithuanian has created one of the biggest surprises of recent years in European gymnastics. At last year’s European Championships in Mersin, in the finals on the Horizontal bar, he probably managed to do all the elements he had ever tried in training. In relation to the qualifications, a few days earlier, he raised the start of the exercise from 5.5 to 6.4. No one could believe, probably not even himself, that he would be able to do absolutely all that on December 13, 2020. Tvorogal made a score of 14,800, by two tenths higher than our Tin Srbić, who was known as the big favorite. The gold from Mersin is the biggest result of this Lithuanian born on October 5, 1994 in the capital Vilnius, together with the first place at the European Games in Minsk achieved a year earlier. The Horizontal bar is not the only discipline on which he is successful. At the same European Championship in Mersin, he also won bronze medal on the Rings, in which he triumphed in Osijek in 2019. He is also only Lithuanian gymnast to win gold at the European Championships.
Sašo Bertoncelj (Slovenia)
Although Slovenia organizes competitions for the World Gymnastics Cup as well, the experienced Sašo Bertoncelj has almost become a trademark of the DOBRO World Cup. He achieved a number of successes in the sports arena Gradski vrt. In his first performance he won second place, in 2011 he was third, he repeated the same result in 2016, and in 2012 he left Osijek as the winner. Born in Kranj on July 16, 1984. A great rival, but also a friend with Robert Seligman, with whom he shared a silver medal in Glasgow in 2018, which is another link with Osijek. Bertoncelj also has two bronze medals from the European Championships (2010 and 2014), and in 2018 one gymnastic element on a Pommel Horse was named after him, thus becoming the fourth Slovenian with his element.
Nina Derwael (Belgium)
The best Belgian gymnast, born on March 26, 2000. Double European and world champion on the Uneven bars. She was the best on the “old continent” in 2017 in Cluj and in 2018 in Glasgow, where she won silver on the Balance beam, while she conquered the World in Doha in 2018 and Stuttgart in 2019, becoming only the fifth gymnast in history to defend the title world champions on the Uneven bars. She is one of the biggest Belgian hopes to win a medal at the Olympic Games in Tokyo. What makes it special in world gymnastics today is that Uneven bars have become the only discipline that is not ruled by the great American Simone Biles in women’s gymnastics because of Nina.
Emily Thomas (Great Britain)
At the Olympic Games in London, Great Britain will have a national team in team competition, where they will try to win the first medal since 1928. Emily Thomas is also part of the women’s gymnastics Great Britain team. Emily comes from Wales (February 25, 2001). So far, her results at the World Cups stand out the most. She has participated in national trials for the Olympic Games and is awaiting the final list of the team that will represent the UK in the team competition in Tokyo.
Uliana Perebinosova (Russia)
A Russian gymnast who hopes to be included in the team for the Olympic Games in Tokyo. Uliana Perebinosova (born May 4, 2001) already has team gold from Glasgow 2018. At the Russian Championship last year, she won first place in all-around.
Diana Varinska and Anastasiia Bachynska (Ukraine)
Two Ukrainian gymnasts that won gold in the team competition at the European Championships in Mersin. Anastasiia Bachynska (born 4 August 2003) won a bronze medal at the European Championships in Basel this year and has two World Cup victories. The two-year older Varinska (March 22, 2001) has as many as seven first places in World Cup competitions.
Jonna Adlerteg (Sweden)
Born on June 6, 1995, qualifying for the 2012 London Olympics, she became only the second Swedish gymnast to do so. At the European Championships in Moscow in 2013, second place on the Uneven bars, she won the first Swedish gymnastics medal in 50 years. She repeated the same placement in the same discipline in 2018 in Glasgow.
Zsofia Kovacs (Hungary)
Hungary has always given great gymnasts, and today’s leader is Zsofia Kovacs born on April 6, 2000 in Dunajvaros. Participant in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. She was a two-time European champion in Mersin in 2020 when she celebrated in the Vault and Uneven bars, and she added bronze to the success in the team competition, which says enough that Hungary also has a very high-quality women’s team. She proved her versatility in 2017 when she won silver in the all-around at the European Championships in Cluj.
Uctas Sanli Goksu (Turkey)
An experienced Turkish gymnast born on August 30, 1990. She also achieved the greatest success at home in Mersin when she was silver in the Floor. She also owns two silver medals from the Mediterranean Games. Finalist of the 2021 European Championships in Basel, where she took fifth place. She has one World Cup victory as well. She is born April 27, 1993.
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