Daiki Hashimoto's Gymnastics Win

Overview

Daiki Hashimoto's Gymnastics Win refers to the controversial victory of Japanese gymnast Daiki Hashimoto at the 2020 Summer Tokyo Olympics over Chinese gymnast Xiāo Ruòténg in the all-around event. In the vault portion of the event, Hashimoto landed with a stumble, using his right foot to plant himself, whereas Xiāo landed cleanly. Despite this, the judges awarded Hashimoto a significantly higher score, which in part allowed him to take the gold, leading to memes and criticism of the judges among Chinese social media users, some of whom felt the judges were biased to the host nation, Japan.

Background

On July 28th, 2021, the men's all-around gymnastics competition of the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, which featured six events, took place. Japanese gymnast Daiki Hashimoto won the event with an overall score of 88.465, beating out China's Xiao Ruoteng. Hashimoto's high score proved controversial, particularly due to his performance in the vault portion of the event: upon landing his vault, Hashimoto stepped off the landing mat with his right foot to plant himself, yet still received a score of 14.7. Furthermore, Xiao failed to salute the judges before his horizontal bar routine, which is a rule in gymnastics, and was docked 0.3 points for "disrespect," leading to a score of 14.06.^[1] Ultimately, Xiao's vault and horizontal bar scores prevented him from taking gold in the event. Highlights of the competition can be seen on YouTube.^[5]

Developments

The controversy surrounding Hashimoto's high score in the vault caused the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) to release a statement explaining the reasoning behind the score.^[1] The FIG ruled that the difficulty of Hashimoto's vault awarded him 5.6 points, and 0.9 points from a possible 10-point execution score were deducted from his vault for technical errors, including a maximum 0.3 point deduction for the landing error^[2] (shown below).

Despite the explanation, Chinese social media users remained critical of the judging, believing Xiao was robbed by a potential bias towards the home country. Chinese gymnast Li Xiaoping called the result a "pity" and wrote, "Congratulations on the second place. The fact is not that I do not understand [the game] – it’s that I understand it all too well."^[3] Another Chinese gymnast, Chen Yibing,^[4] wrote, "No matter what the result is, Sun Wei and Xiao Ruoteng are perfect! Xiao Ruoteng IS the champion" (shown below, right).

Other Chinese social media users made memes about the landing, treating it as an exploitable image^[1] (examples shown below).

Search Interest

External References