The odds were stacked against him, but European champion Marios Georgiou did his country proud yet again, putting aside the disappointment of not making the cut in the all-round event, to seal a place in the horizontal bar final of the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Delivering a world class performance, Georgiou went through in 8th, securing 14.366 points and will now face the fight of his career for the best possible ranking, with medal hopes considered a distant possibility as the Chinese athletes have dominated.
Nevertheless, everything’s possible in a final of this calibre. Besides, being in the top 8 of an artistic gymnastics discipline in an Olympiad is no mean feat and having the European title to back him up, the dedicated athlete will be delivering his strongest possible showing on Monday August 5th.
This is the 2nd Georgiou appearance in an Olympics final having gone through to the all-round in Rio 2016, while he just missed out in the horizontal bar in Tokyo, ranking ninth.
He was quite close to the all-round too, just three behind the top 25 who went through from the preliminaries, scoring a total 79,498 points.
