Men's all-around preview: Title is Uchimura's to lose

Japan's Kohei Uchimura is the favorite to win the all-around at the 2009 World Championships in London. AP Photo/Alastair Grant

Tonight's battle among the best male gymnasts in the world is probably not going to be for the world all-around gold medal. Kohei Uchimura has made sure of that.

His performance in men's prelims Tuesday showed how superior he is to his closest rivals. Here in London, those are Americans Tim McNeill and Jonathan Horton, Russia's Maxim Devyatovsky and hometown favorite Daniel Keatings of Great Britain.

Nothing's a certainty, but Uchimura's results in the preliminaries were telling. If this were a meet where the scores carried over from prelims, he would have a lead of more than a point and a half. The way the Olympic all-around silver medalist has been performing, that would be more than enough breathing room.

For the sake of competition, maybe we should be glad the scoreboard has been wiped completely clean. Results from the preliminaries do not carry over from the previous day's competition, so everybody gets a fresh start. The man best man tonight wins.

That should make Jonathan Horton happy. The U.S. Champion wasn't himself during preliminaries, looking a tad out of sorts on floor, falling on pommel horse and finishing fifth overall, almost three points behind Uchimura. Horton gets a chance to redeem himself in this final. But if Horton wants to medal, he must hit pommel horse. The U.S. is generally weak enough on that event that you can fall at a U.S. Championship once or twice (as Horton did) and still win if you're good at everything else (which Horton is). But in London, with anything below 13.5, he probably won't medal.

Tim McNeill, on the other hand, needs to do exactly what he did on Tuesday -- stay calm, stay focused, and just keep hitting his routines. It's interesting that of the two, McNeill did better on the first day. But this is a two-day competition, and all of Tuesday's hard work means nothing now. McNeill has one advantage -- he's really, really good on pommel horse. This will help him immensely tonight. If there's a disadvantage, it's probably his lack of experience -- this is McNeill's first major international meet. Experience affects some people. Others, not as much. We'll see if it affects McNeill tonight.

Russian Maxim Devyatovsky, who famously stated that there's no difference between seventh place and 24th to him, is not an event specialist. Devyatovsky is the only gymnast in the top three not to have made any event final, but his weaknesses are minimal. While Devyatovsky may think a silver medal just makes him the first loser, the Russian coaches probably disagree. He can't pull another stunt like at the 2007 Worlds, where he gave up when it became clear he wouldn't win the all-around final. I'd expect Devyatovsky has been told to give his all for the entire competiition -- or else.

Like Horton, tonight is another chance for Daniel Keatings. A lot is at stake for Keatings, who was impressive in prelims despite falling on his dismount on pommel horse during prelims: putting on a show for the home crowd, sure, but more importantly, establishing the British men as a group to be taken seriously for the next three years.

Thanks to clean scoring, it's a chance for a lot of other people too, including Mykola Kuksenskov of Ukraine, sixth all-around after prelims, Israel's Alexander Shatilov and Japan's Kazuhito Tanaka, who could really move up in the standings with a clean performance.