OLYMPICS/ Team china
No horsing around for Xiao
By Yu Yilei (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-09-14 14:19
Chinese gymnast Xiao Qin proved his mastery of the pommel horse last week in Stuttgart by winning his third career World Championship title.
 While most of the gymnasts struggled, Xiao showed his class, combining power with dexterity, balance and ballet-like grace in his winning program.
He scored 16.3 points with a distant 0.6-point lead over the silver-winning Krisztian Berki of Hungary, underlining a dominance on the apparatus that is likely to help him triumph in front of a supportive home crowd in Beijing next summer.
"I just took the Stuttgart tournament as a rehearsal for the Olympics," said Xiao, a 22-year-old from Nanjing.
Like many of China's gymnastic stars, Xiao started training early at age five and made the national team in 1999 at the age of 14.
He was trained to be an all-rounder but soon attracted people's attention with his skills on the pommel horse.
He took a silver medal in the event at the 2001 worlds and was crowned national champion the following year.
After winning his first world title as a member of the men's team at the 2003 worlds, he then stamped his individual supremacy in 2006 on his favorite apparatus with a gold at the Melbourne worlds.
Since then, he has proven almost unbeatable at the event - extending his championship winning streak to Stuttgart and earning the nickname "petite god on the horse" along the way.
While many regard him as a sure thing for Olympic gold in 2008, Xiao knows the challenge is growing. Since the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) reformed the scoring system by abolishing degree-of-difficulty limits shortly after the 2004 Olympics, other gymnasts have begun attempting much trickier routines with greater measures of success.
"With the old scoring system, I was always sure I could win the gold if I was feeling good about my performance. Two years ago, I felt the same with the new system because my routine was much more difficult than others. But this time I did not have the same feeling because I found they started to try more difficult routines," Xiao said, after witnessing Berki's complicated routine net the Hungarian a silver.
"The battle next year will be hotter because everyone will be trying to go one better.
"The only way to victory is to ramp up the difficulty level of my own routine," he said.
Xiao knows he needs to hold his nerve if he wants to win his first Olympic gold.
In Athens in 2004 he failed to advance to the final after committing a disastrous mistake in qualifying. A similar error happened last year as he lost his grip on the Asian title after falling from the horse during the 2006 Doha Asian Games.
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