Yang Hak-seon

Yang Hak-Seon
Personal information
Full name Yang Hak-Seon
Nickname(s) The God of Vault
Country represented  South Korea
Born (1992-12-06) December 6, 1992
Gwangju, South Korea
Height 1.59 m (5 ft 3 in)
Discipline Men's artistic gymnastics
Eponymous skills Yang
Medal record
Olympic Games
2012 London Vault
World Championships
2011 Tokyo Vault
2013 Antwerp Vault
Asian Games
2010 Guangzhou Vault
2014 Incheon Team
2014 Incheon Vault
Summer Universiade
2013 KazanVault
2015 GwangjuTeam
Yang Hak-seon
Hangul 양학선
Hanja 梁鶴善
Revised Romanization Yang Hak-seon
McCune–Reischauer Yang Hak-sŏn

Yang Hak-seon (Hangul: 양학선; Hanja: 梁鶴善 ; born 6 December 1992) is a South Korean gymnast specializing in the vault event. He is the first South Korean gymnast to win an Olympic gold medal.

Personal life

According to his Olympic profile, Yang started his gymnastics career at the age of 9, following his brother's footsteps into the sport.[1]

Yang is currently attending the Korea National Sport University.[2]

Yang's parents are Yang Gwan-gwon and Ki Suk-hyang.[3] Their impoverished family previously lived in one of Gwangju's shantytowns, before relocating to North Jeolla Province's Gochang, in South Korea's countryside, in 2010, after his father, a construction worker, suffered from serious injuries.[3] His family currently lives in a makeshift converted greenhouse constructed from PVC pipes.[2] After Yang's father lost his job, Yang supported the family with a modest income from the Korea Gymnastic Association.[4] Yang's coach Cho Sung-doe admitted that he had been unaware of the family's precarious financial situation before Yang won the gold medal.[4]

Career

Yang is the reigning vault champion at the Asian Games. In 2012, he became the first Korean gymnast to win Olympic gold in gymnastics, winning the vault competition in London.[3] In 2013, he went on to win gold in vault at the 2013 Summer Universiade in Kazan, Russia. He is famous in the gymnastics world for performing one of the two hardest vaults in the world, the Yang, which is a front handspring on and three twists off in layout position. It was unveiled at the 2011 World Championships in Tokyo, and carried the highest ever difficulty score of 7.4 in men's vault at the time under the 2009-2012 Code of Points (CoP). The difficulty score (D-score) of the Yang has been adjusted at the beginning of every quarter since, initially down to 6.4 under the 2012-2016 CoP and now down to 6.0 under the current 2017-2020 CoP. The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) regularly reassess and adjusts D-scores (typically) down due to the advancement of skills in gymnastics, especially on vault because of its D-scores being assigned numeric values instead of alphabetical representations, the only apparatus in gymnastics to do so. Yang is additionally said to be working on a second difficult vault, but this one is a sideways entry.[5]

Yang was a reigning world champion, having won gold in vault at both the 2011[6] and 2013 World Championships in Tokyo and Antwerp respectively.[7] However, at the 2014 World Championships in Nanning, China, he fell on both his vaults, failing to defend his title and placing seventh overall. He was similarly unable to defend his Olympic title at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro due to injury. At the 2017 Artistic Gymnastics World Championships in Montreal, Canada, Yang had qualified in first place for the vault event final but pulled out after that due to injury.

Eponymous skills

Yang currently shares the honour with Kenzō Shirai of Japan for having one of the two skills with the highest D-score of 6.0 in men's vault under the FIG's most current 2017–2020 CoP to be named after them. The Yang is a front handspring (forwards) entry family vault (as opposed to all of Shirai's vaults belonging to the Yurchenko or round-off [backward] entry family), and it has a front handspring takeoff (forwards) onto the vaulting platform and then into a triple-twisting layout off the platform ending in a blind landing. So far, Yang and Shirai remain the only gymnasts who have successfully performed their respective version of the two most difficult vaults in the world.

References

  1. ↑ "Hak Seon Yang". Athlete overviews. London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Retrieved 9 August 2012.
  2. 1 2 [런던] 양학선 꿈 자란 비닐하우스 들여다보니 '울컥'. Nate News (in Korean). NATE. 7 August 2012. Retrieved 9 August 2012.
  3. 1 2 3 Kang Seung-woo (August 7, 2010). "Korean gymnast rises from poverty". The Korea Times. Retrieved August 9, 2012.
  4. 1 2 Kwon, KJ; Alexis Lai. "Gymnastics Olympics 2012: Yang Hak-seon, South Korean gold gymnast, vaults from rags to riches". CNN. Retrieved 9 August 2012.
  5. ↑ Sport Chosun (October 6, 2013). "'도마의신'양학선 세계체조선수권 2연패,적수 없었다(in Korean)". Naver.
  6. ↑ S (October 6, 2013). "Exciting showdown at Tokyo Worlds". Tokyo2011.fig-gymnastics.com.
  7. ↑ S (October 6, 2013). "South Korea's Yang wins men's vault title at gymnastics worlds". Nampa.org.
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