Former Oklahoma standout Chris Brooks sits atop the leaderboard after Thursday's preliminary round at the men's Winter Cup Challenge in Las Vegas, Nev.
Brooks, 23, scored 88.3 to lead U.S. champion Jonathan Horton (86.5) and 2009 World team member Danell Leyva (86.1). Stanford junior Tim Gentry was fourth (85.6) followed by Jake Bateman of the U.S. Olympic Training Center (85.35).
Brooks, who trained at Houston North Gymnastics under Bill Foster before going to Oklahoma, posted the highest scores on vault (16.3) and high bar (15.6) but just 12.55 on pommel horse. He also scored 14.4 on floor, 14.65 on rings and 14.8 on parallel bars.
In his first competition of 2010, Horton seemed to conquer some of the problems he had last year. His 13.9 on pommel horse, which was matched by Leyva, indicated a step forward for him on the event that has always been his nemesis. Horton's high score was 15.75 for vault, but he received only 13.15 on parallel bars.
Chris Brooks, 2010 Winter Cup Prelims, High Bar:
Chris Brooks, 2010 Winter Cup prelims, pommel horse:
Leyva's high was 15.4 on parallel bars. His normally high-scoring high bar routine, which includes a Kovacs and now a Liukin (layout Tkatchev with a full twist) received only 13.8.
2008 U.S. Olympian Sasha Artemev competed on everything except rings and vault, but scored poorly on floor (12.4) and pommel horse (12.85), his specialty. Artemev also received a 13.05 on parallel bars and 13.5 on high bar. Kevin Tan, also a member of the U.S.'s bronze medal winning team in Beijing, sat out on vault and floor but showed routines on pommel horse (14.35), parallel bars (14.75), high bar (13.95) and his specialty, rings (14.0).
U.S. tumbler Kalon Ludvigson scored 14.2 on floor and 15.4 on vault, while guest competitor Charlie Tamayo, who defected from Cuba in 2003, scored 13.1 on floor and 15.8 on vault.
Results are available here from USA Gymnastics.
Follow Gymnastics Examiner Blythe Lawrence on Twitter at www.twitter.com/GymExaminer.
Comments
When I was looking at the score sheet online, I believe I saw Artemev at only around 4.8 difficulty on all of his events. Is there any word on whether he was planning on doing really watered down routines just to get back in competition? Or did he just have some sort of breakdown and leave a lot of stuff out all day?
Sasha Artemev did not qualify to day two at the Winter Cup and is therefore ineligible for 2010 National Team inclusion.
Does anyone know why Tim Mcneil didn't compete he was supposed to be there, I hope he isn't injured.
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