- TOKYO: Yang Hak-seon of South Korea won the men’s vault title at the world gymnastics championships in impressive fashion Sunday, doing the hardest vault ever attempted.
Yang’s handspring front triple twist — twisting three times while doing a somersault in a stretched-out position — has a start value of 7.4, two-tenths of a point higher than any other vault done, and four-tenths higher than the vault most of the top men do. And Yang did it nearly perfectly and needing only a small step on the landing to steady himself.
He scored a 16.566, finishing two-tenths ahead of Russia’s Anton Golotsutskov, the Olympic bronze medalist. Makoto Okiguchi of Japan was third.