Max Whitlock conquers anxiety to lead young GB team closer to Olympic gymnastics history

Max Whitlock would be a very good poker player, apparently nerveless but inside his stomach churning perfect ten somersaults.

The six-time Olympic medallist admitted he’d rarely felt so anxious as he helped team-mates Joe Fraser, Jake Jarman, Harry Hepworth, and Luke Whitehouse secure their place in Monday’s team artistic gymnastics final.

Whitlock is calling time on his career here in Paris and knew one slip – in a sport where the margins between champ and chump can be razor thin – could have brought the curtain down prematurely at the Bercy Arena.

However, he had nothing to worry about. Jarman, Hepworth and Whitehouse, newcomers at this level, looked totally at home under the glare of the big light.

Former world champion Fraser was as reliable as ever and Whitlock rode his trademark pommel horse in style – without a whip or curse in sight.

Whitlock’s first Olympic medal was a bronze in the team event at London 2012, which has been followed with two fourth places in Rio and Tokyo. This new-look team appears to be his best chance since London to return back to the podium from a team perspective.

“It’s my last Olympic Games and I knew I had one shot, if it didn’t go right on this first day, when the nerves were at the highest and the pressure was through the roof, it could have all stopped today. That was really hard to deal with,” said Whitlock.

“There is just a lot of relief right now, qualifications are always so tough, especially at the Olympics, and everybody was really feeling it, we knew what was a stake.

“We had three people in that team becoming Olympians for the first time, but we all did our individual jobs, and we can take a lot of confidence from that.

“We just gel together, and we know what we need to do, when to get behind each other and when to chill too. We’ve done our first job, and it feels great to leave an arena knowing every person did all they could. That is a really good team score.”

Whitlock will surely have done enough to secure his place in next week’s pommel horse final, as he seeks to win the title for the third consecutive Games, though that won’t be confirmed until late on Saturday, when the qualifying competition concludes.

Whitehouse, a back-to-back European champion on the floor, looked good on his signature apparatus while Hepworth shone on both vault and rings and Fraser underlined his credentials on the parallel and horizontal bars.

“I’m really pleased with that pommel performance,” added Whitlock. “I try to not focus too much on scores, there are some things to clean up and some difficulty things I can do to increase what I can get from the judges.”

Jarman made his breakthrough at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, winning four golds, and was scouted by a coach from famous club Huntingdon while swinging from the monkey bars in his local park.

Solid across all six apparatus, he was Team GB’s highest-ranked gymnast in the provisional standings for the men’s blue-riband all-around competition.

“We’ve got around three generations of gymnasts out here – there is so much depth in this team,” said Jarman, who is looking to complete his set of vault gold medals as the reigning world, European and Commonwealth champion.

“A lot of people see us as a team of individual specialists but when we come together, I feel like we can show that we can do well as a collective.”

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