Rio 2016: For the Motherland

Japan's Kohei Uchimura competes on the horizontal bar en route to the gold medal. (Photo: AFP)

Most athletes would have nothing left to compete for after winning a combined 26 Olympic and world medals, but Japanese gymnastics great Kohei Uchimura has his eye set on the next Summer Games in Tokyo.

Uchimura will be 31 when Tokyo hosts the 2020 Olympics, and he would be gunning for a record third consecutive all around gold.

“The 2020 Olympics will be in the country I was born in so of course I want to aim to compete,” Uchimura said.

But the man who became the first gymnast in 44 years to win back-to-back Olympic all around titles on Wednesday, has a bigger goal.

With the class of 2016 featuring four veterans from the 2012 London Games - Uchimura, Koji Yamamuro, Ryohei Kato, and Yusuke Tanaka — the 27-year-old wants to make sure it is not an ageing squad that turns up to defend the team title they won on Monday.

By the time the Olympic bandwagon rolls into Tokyo, Uchimura, Yamamuro and Tanaka will all be over 30 - an age when there is no guarantee they can maintain their levels of excellence.

“Other Japanese gymnasts have four years so I think they can do it. I want a Japanese to be...world champion,” he said of the need for a new crop of gymnasts to prepare for the 2020 Games. He knows the next generation need to come up fast because going by Wednesday’s showing, he came perilously close to losing his crown. The holder of a record six consecutive world titles edged past Ukraine’s Oleg Verniaiev, 22, by a mere 0.099 of a point with a thrilling routine on the final apparatus, the horizontal bar.

“I knew he was ahead but I wasn’t calculating points. I thought if I just give my performance. Today was my best performance ever.”

Uchimura sounded weary from all the preparation put into reaching the Olympics every four years — not to mention the wear and tear on his body.

But after all his years of soaring tumbles and high-flying routines, Uchimura still loves putting on a good show above all. “I was able to put on a good performance showing the challenging and interesting aspects of gymnastics. I’m happy I could do that.”