Is 1996 Olympic floor champion Ioannis Melissanidis, the Greek who hated back handsprings, planning an Olympic return?
The short answer is no. But Melissanidis, who also competed at the 2000 Olympic Games and pioneered the Yurchenko double back vault, isn't ruling out a return to serious competition.
"It would be impossible for next year's Olympics but there are other competitions -- European championships, World Cup events, the Mediterranean Games...anything is possible," Melissanidis, who now lives in New York, told Agence France Presse in a recent interview.
Melissanidis, now 34, became a national hero in Greece after winning floor in Atlanta for a routine in which he upped the difficulty by doing almost all his tumbling out of whipbacks. He was the first Greek man to win a medal in gymnastics since the 1906 intercalated Olympic Games.
After being too injured to compete at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Melissanidis moved to New York to pursue a passion for acting. But he has continued training -- three hours per day, currently. And he doesn't look too bad
The Greek men have several strong individual competitors, namely current World floor champion Eleftherios Kosmidis and former World high bar champion Vlasios Maras, but finished 25th as a team at the 2010 Worlds, meaning they will not compete a team at the 2011 Worlds in Tokyo.
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