Yorkshire Olympian Luke Whitehouse wins THIRD gold medal of the year
A year ago today, Luke Whitehouse strode out into the huge, packed Bercy Arena as part of the Great Britain gymnastics squad bidding for glory in the team final at the Paris Olympics.
The then-22-year-old from Halifax, competing alongside his team-mate from Leeds Gymnastics Club, Harry Hepworth, and household British names like Max Whitlock and Jake Jarman, helped Team GB’s men to a fourth-place finish on a busy night of gymnastics.
So often the worst place to finish at an Olympics, it was a still a red letter day for Whitehouse, who later in those Games finished sixth in the individual floor final before cheering on Hepworth to a bronze medal in the vault.
Almost 12 months to the day, Whitehouse was celebrating again, this time a return to the top step of a major international podium, something he has achieved three times this year.
For on Sunday, Whitehouse made history as only the third British athlete to win a gymnastics gold at the World Student Games in the Rhine-Ruhr region of Germany, when he took the title in the floor exercise.
Not only that, but he beat the Paris Olympic all-around gold-medallist Shinnosuke Oka of Japan in the process.
Whitehouse qualified for the final by electing to execute the hardest routine and he repeated the highest difficulty routine of the competition (6.1) in the final, his reward being a victorious score of 14.566, 0.2 marks better than Oka.
Whitehouse - a student at Leeds Beckett University studying sport exercise therapy - was supported in Germany by long-time coach Andy Butcher, who along with fellow Leeds Gymnastics Club coaches Dave Murray and Tom Rawlinson have created a pipeline of local talent for the biggest stages.
Earlier this year, Whitehouse won gold at the European Championships in Leipzig on the floor for a third successive year – underlining his status as the continent’s best at that discipline - and teamed up with Hepworth and their fellow Great Britain athletes to win gold in the team event as well.
The next major event to build towards for Whitehouse and Hepworth is the World Championships in Jakarta, Indonesia, in October.