Canada’s women’s gymnastics team earns Olympic berth
Posted January 11, 2012 10:25 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Jennifer Lukas, CTVOlympics.ca Staff
Canada’s women’s artistic gymnastics team has booked a ticket to London 2012 after a phenomenal performance at the Artistic Gymnastic Olympic Games Test Event in London on Wednesday.
With four remaining Olympic berths on the table and just three teams left to compete, Canada’s Peng Peng Lee, Kristina Vaculik, Victoria Moors, Talia Chiarelli and Madeline Gardiner finished the morning competition in first place with a combined 221.931 score.
“It’s an incredible experience I’ll never forget,” a smiling Lee told CTVOlympics.ca.
“It kind of just hit me right now that this is going to be the Olympics and I’m so excited, I’m so pumped to just go home and work.”
It was a bounce-back performance by Canada after failing to qualify at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Tokyo last fall. The team needed a top-eight score in Japan, but an 11th-place finish relegated the women to this week’s second-chance competition. It was an opportunity the team made the most of.
“Our score today was so much more improved than at Worlds, so I have a good feeling,” said Lee, adding that she and her teammates worked hard on cleaning up their landings after their Tokyo disappointment. “Some of us were just focusing on the execution part of it because that’s where a lot of us were getting our deductions from.”
If the current standings hold, France, Belgium and Spain will be joining the Canadian women in earning automatic berths to next Summer’s Olympic Games in London.
While the other nation’s must await the final results, it was time to celebrate for the Canadian women.
“I’m really happy with how my team did today,” Vaculik said. “I’m just so amazed with them and how we’ve been building up to this competition, how we’ve been building as a team, gaining confidence and I think it really shows.”
