Petrounias wins silver at the World Championships
The "King of the Hoops" collected 15,066 points in the final of the event, in Antwerp, after an excellent execution of his program that had a difficulty factor of 6.30 and an incredible exit after being pinned to the ground.
The "gold" Olympic champion in hoops, in 2016 in Rio de Janeiro and "bronze" in Tokyo (2020), Lefteris Patrounias, will also be at the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024, as today he secured the Olympic qualification.
Petrounias was leading until the second-to-last in the final line-up was performed by China's Tokyo Olympic gold medalist Yang Liu, who was... flawless and scored 15,233 points to win the gold medal, second in the links in his career after that of 2014 (Nunning). The bronze medal was won by the Chinese Hao You with 14,833 points.
The Antwerp World Championship is also a Pre-Olympic and Lefteris Petrounias was claiming the one and only place that guaranteed direct qualification to the 2024 Olympic Games.
Petrounias needed a higher rating than only Azero Simonov, Austria's Heck and Armenia's Avetisian and Davtian, as the other finalists have already secured Olympic team qualification with China and Britain and are not eligible to claim additional places.
And he succeeded by winning a silver medal in a World Championship for the first time! In 2019, Petrounias took 4th place at the World Championships in Stuttgart, and despite his absence from the respective events in 2021 and 2022, the Greek champion came back strongly to take silver.
In addition to the three gold medals at the World Championships (2015 Glasgow, 2017 Montreal, 2018 Doha) and the silver this year (2023, Antwerp), Lefteris Petrounias also has 6 gold medals (2015 Montpellier, 2016 Bern, 2017 Cluj-Napoca, 2018 Glasgow, 2021 Basel, 2022 Munich) and two bronze medals (2011 Berlin, 2023 Antalya) in European Championships, one gold medal in World Cup (2023 Cottbus), one gold medal (2015 Baku) in European Games and one gold medal in Mediterranean Games (2013 Mersini).
Last year in Munich, with his sixth gold medal at the European Championships, he became the leading specialist in the history of European artistic gymnastics, equaling the Hungarian pommel horse expert Christian Berky, who until then held the all-time record with six titles in the same institution (2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012).
The ranking:
1. Yang Liu (China) - 15,233
2. Lefteris Petrounias (Greece) - 15,066
3. Hao You (China) - 14,833
4. Vahagn Davtian (Armenia) - 14,700
5. Nikita Simonov (Azerbaijan) - 14,666
6. Vincent Heck (Austria) - 14,566
7. Artur Avetisyan (Armenia) - 14,433
8. Harry Hepworth (Great Britain) - 14,100
