Isabela Onyshko of Brandon, MB and Victoria-Kayen Woo of Brossard, QC represented Canada strongly in the women’s artistic gymnastics qualifiers at the Aquece Rio Test Event Saturday in Rio with Onyshko finishing 10th overall and Woo 40th. With Canada already qualified for the Olympic Games this summer, both athletes were here to gain experience as they prepare for their final Olympic team selection camp in June.
“We wanted to give Isabela an opportunity to see the arena where she’ll be competing in, and to experience what the competition will be like in terms of the size of the audience and the noise of the audience,” said her coach, Joe Stouffer of Brandon, MB. “In terms of her performance, we wanted to show some improvement in execution, particularly on bars and balance beam and I think we showed that. We still have some work to do on cleaning things up, but we’re happy with where we’re at for this stage of her preparation.”
Onyshko performed strongly on all four apparatus to finish with a total score of 55.132. A clean routine on beam, which had the highest difficulty score of the day at 6.400, qualified her for the event finals on Monday with a final score of 14.266. She will also compete in the floor exercise finals. Woo was solid as well, scoring her highest score to date on the uneven bars (13.966) and finished with a total score of 52.799. 2015 European All-Around Champion Giulia Steingruber of Switzerland was the top finisher overall with a score of 57.607.
While not satisfied with her 10th place finish, Onyshko learned some key lessons about Rio and the competition venue to bring back to her teammates in Canada: “The climate plays a significant role in how you should train – it’s a lot different than the Canadian climate, so that’s probably the biggest thing I’m going to bring back to Canada!”
The balance beam apparatus finals take place Monday, April 18th, starting at 17:40 ET, and the floor exercise finals are at 19:30 ET.
