The last impression lasts the longest, this applies to oral exams as well as to the first visit to critical parents-in-law and also to events in front of thousands of spectators in high-performance sport.
In this case it was the eagerly awaited penultimate performance of the German gymnastics team at the European Championships in the Olympic Hall on Sunday afternoon. Around 8,000 spectators, including many gymnastics families, had gathered to experience some sporting success among the male gymnasts. They had a bizarre, but still good qualifying competition on Friday and then showed a team competition on Saturday, which must also be checked off as a failure: the team had started offensively and dynamically and was then passed after five falls on the floor mat. It finished seventh out of eight teams.
That left Sunday with two DTB gymnasts in the individual finals, and it was a successful afternoon for friends of excitement, with even a medal, a bronze one. The afternoon seemed to be cut like a good crime plot with Nils Dunkel from Halle, who as a specialized pommel horse gymnast is as rare in the German gymnastics milieu as an exotic butterfly. And of course with Lukas Dauser from Munich, who starts for TSV Unterhaching, as an all-rounder, but above all on parallel bars. Many German athletes practice this discipline successfully, but not as strong, demanding and yet elegant as the Olympic silver medalist Dauser, who nevertheless suddenly stood on the mat this Sunday after a good third of the exercise.
The Germans had never been a big pommel team, rather they specialized in high bar and parallel bars
His exercise is peppered with maximum difficulties, it has 6.6 points in the initial value, of which Dauser ideally has so much left after the deductions in the added posture grade (initially ten points) that he is well over 15 points. But now it was out of the question. Dauser, who otherwise safely walks over the bars through this exercise, which looks like a maze, suddenly caught his right leg in a normal swing on the bar, had to dismount and was, yes, devastated.
Not for himself, but for the men’s department in the association and the organizers of this gymnastics weekend, what had happened two hours earlier in this hall helped all the more. Nils Dunkel, 25 years old, got his horse medal around his neck, the last time this happened to the German Gymnastics Federation was in a major event in 2006, when Eugen Spiridonov won silver at the European Championships. The Germans had never been a big pommel team, they specialized more in high bar and parallel bars, and when a promising talent like Dunkel appears, then he already has a special personal story about pommel horses.
Dunkel says that he showed approaches for this device early on. Even as a child he loved to balance over beams and other obstacles. His sense of balance, it was found, was particularly keen. And even during the first specific exercises, Dunkel didn’t curse, but rather enjoyed this leather horse, which was originally created to train soldiers in long rotations to stay in the saddle for as long as possible in confusing situations.
Dauser was someone whose potential could be planned for in the gymnastics association
Which does not mean that a horse gymnast keeps calm in every situation. In any case, Dunkel says he always feels so excited before a performance that his hands begin to tremble uncontrollably if he doesn’t do special exercises to calm down before the performance. He did well, in the end only the pommel cracks Harutyun Merdinyan (Armenia) and Loran de Munck (Netherlands) were ahead of him. Dunkel mastered all obstacles in his exercise, including the bigger ones: Shortly after the start, the 360-degree turn on a pommel that can no longer be corrected in rotation because it is only carried on one arm. And at the end there is the long hike over the horse and back again, with a turn that can be just as treacherous.
A bit of Dunkel’s unexpected success cushioned the disappointment that Lukas Dauser was likely to carry around for a long time. Dauser was someone whose potential could be planned for in the gymnastics association and also in the general host balance sheet, and he had improved accordingly beforehand. In qualifying, he managed a still mediocre, but still expensive execution, which decisively kept his team in the race. And in the team competition itself, he contributed a drill that was nearly as perfect as his Olympic silver version.
But then he climbed up, probably also slightly irritated by a very short warm-up time, or for some other reason, which after the good start suddenly throttled the tension in his body slightly, making his wish for this special home medal lapsed.