Having competed in the Tel Aviv and Osijek events a few months prior, Morgans used Paris as the platform to get vital competition minutes before the World Championships, which will be held this year in Antwerp, Belgium. The Sydney-born gymnast qualified for the finals as the eighth-best qualifier, where he upped the ante in his routine and scored a 14.650 to take him into a potential gold medal-winning position.
He would eventually settle for the silver medal when German rival Lukas Dauser gained more than half a point on Australian, scoring with a 15.250 to take the win. The silver medal result was Australia’s 11th medal of the World Challenge Cup season and for Morgans, it was a culmination of three months of planning and preparation that began soon after competing in Tel Aviv and Osijek.
“Ten to twelve weeks ago, we started to dial in our routine preparation and we just started to hammer away at different parts of the routine in order to get things right,” Morgans told SBS Sport.
“To be fair, it’s not been the smoothest of preparations heading into Paris, as I’ve struggled with a few injuries. But once we got over to Europe, everything seemed to have clicked into place. I was hoping for a better score, but I sat down with my coach after qualifying and told him that I was going to go for it in the finals.”
LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND - October 31: Mitchell Morgans of Australia reacts after performing his horizontal bar routine during Men's qualifications at the World Gymnastics Championships-Liverpool 2022 at M&S Bank Arena on October 31st 2022 in Liverpool, England. (Photo by Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images) Source: ABACA / Abdullah Firas/ABACA/PA/Alamy
“Lukas is quite good on the parallel bars and he’s always up there when it comes to getting medals at the World Championships," said Morgans, "so I knew he was always going to be a tough competitor and all I could do was just focus on my own performance and I left it up to him to see what he could do.”
The Paris World Challenge Cup is traditionally the last event of the season and with this year’s World Cup event being considered by many as a dress rehearsal for next year’s Olympics, the largely parochial Parisian crowd left a huge impression on the Sydney-born athlete.
“I’ve never really experienced a crowd that big and the atmosphere within the arena was just crazy, so it was pretty exciting to get a medal in Paris.” Morgans said. “That was one of the biggest reasons to go to the Paris World Cup, which was to get the feel of the venue and get myself used to that kind of space and atmosphere.”
“What they do there is just awesome, so I think next year with the Olympics will just be insane.”
Heading into the World Championships in Belgium, Morgans believes that competing in the Paris World Challenge Cup is the ideal preparation for what will be a big challenge competing against the world’s best.
“I think Paris is a great stepping stone for me,” he said. “It’s a competition where I can see an accurate representation of the results and where I’m actually placed in the scores I’m getting. From there, I’ve gone back and spoken to our judges to see how we can extract more points and squeeze everything I can out of my routine, come the World Championships.”
He also added that the camaraderie within the Australian team is at an all-time high and are rallying around each other in what will be the biggest event of the year for all of them.
“Amongst us athletes, we have this closeness where we all go through the same stuff. We all go through injuries, we all have these highs and lows and that’s something that we can really bond over.
“As a team, I think it’s one of closer knit teams we’ve had between guys and girls and when one of us has success, it feels like we all share that success and that’s an awesome kind of atmosphere to have.”
The Australian Artistic Gymnastics team that will take on the World Championships in Belgium.
You can catch up on extended highlights from the FIG World Challenge Cup in Paris EXCLUSIVELY on SBS On Demand.
