DgcityChina won both the men’s and women’s artistic gymnastics team titles at the Dakar Youth Olympics on Monday, a double gold that underlined the depth of the country’s next generation.
The men’s team of Yang Lanbin, Li Lezheng and Zhao Ruiyang scored 158.463 points at the Dakar Exhibition Center, with strong routines on floor exercise, horizontal bar and parallel bars, finishing ahead of Japan and Britain. The women’s trio of Chen Ziyan, Zhong Qi and Xie Guying then delivered on the uneven bars and balance beam to score 107.798, edging Japan by just 0.234.
Margins that thin leave no room for a missed routine, and Xie said the team’s traditional strengths on bars and beam had held firm under pressure. In a team event, she added, the decisive factor is that everyone supports one another. Yang said the gold had not come easily, with intensive weekly routines during preparations carefully managed to control fatigue and avoid injury.
China’s gymnastics program has long treated the apparatus where the country holds a technical edge as anchors, and the Dakar scoring reflected that. The women’s team had qualified first a day earlier, with Xie and Zhong also ranking 1-2 in individual all-around qualifying, setting up more medal chances before the week ended.
The sport is in a generational handover globally, and Youth Olympic results offer an early reading of which programs have reloaded. On Monday’s evidence, China’s pipeline remains robust across both the men’s and women’s squads, with Japan the closest rival in precisely the events where Asian gymnastics has set the technical pace.
Athletics brought China two more silvers and a bronze the same evening. Chen Shijie ran a personal best 13.40 to finish second in the men’s 110-meter hurdles, Liu Sen cleared a personal best 2.14 meters for high jump silver, and Liu Han took 400-meter bronze in 47.16.
The gymnastics double was the headline, though, earned by teams with barely any senior international experience, performing their hardest routines half a world from home and thriving on the sport’s biggest youth stage. Both squads will now turn to individual apparatus finals, where several of the same gymnasts start among the favorites.
