Such depth of talent should be more than enough to secure Olympic qualification against opponents such as Canada, France, Spain, Brazil, Italy, Peru and Belarus, but GB performance director Tim Jones has warned against complacency.
He also ordered the British squad to tone down the difficulty of their routines to avoid mishaps. “Gymnastics is a balance between the difficulty of the routine and the quality of the execution of it,” Jones said. “You can push the difficulty, but there tends to be a payback in terms of execution.
“We’ve made the call this time that it’s better to be safe. We’ve not stripped out all of the difficulty but, anything that is absolutely not rock solid, we feel it is not the time to be exposing it.” With more than 40,000 tickets sold for the test event, Jones will be hoping the squad do not succumb to the pressure that appeared to afflict them in Japan.
“The result in Tokyo is something that, two or three days out, we really wouldn’t have predicted,” said Jones. “The boys were looking good in the build-up and even when the competition started, the performances in the first three pieces were solid.
“But then we had a really, really poor high bar, and that is where the wheels came off to such an extent that we couldn’t pull it round on the last two pieces.”
Locog chief executive Paul Deighton said he was keeping his fingers crossed that the men seal their qualification. “From a host city point of view, we’d love to have the British athletes competing and the British men are a great team,” he said.
