Yang Hak seon

Personal life

According to his Olympic profile, Yang started his gymnastics career at the age of 9, following his brother's footsteps into the sport.

Yang is currently attending the Korea National Sport University.

Yang's parents are Yang Gwan-gwon and Ki Suk-hyang. Their impoverished family previously lived in one of Gwangju's shantytowns, before relocating to North Jeolla Province's Gochang, in South Korea's countryside, in 2010, after his father, a construction worker, suffered from serious injuries. His family currently lives in a makeshift converted greenhouse constructed from PVC pipes. After Yang's father lost his job, Yang supported the family with a modest income from the Korea Gymnastic Association. Yang's coach Cho Sung-doe admitted that he had been unaware of the family's precarious financial situation before Yang won the gold medal.

Career

Yang is the reigning vault champion at the Asian Games. In 2012, he became the first Korean gymnast to win Olympic gold in gymnastics, winning the vault competition in London. In 2013, he went on to win gold in vault at the 2013 Summer Universiade in Kazan, Russia. He is famous in the gymnastics world for performing one of the two hardest vaults in the world, the "Yang", which is a front handspring on and three twists off in layout position. It was unveiled at the 2011 World Championships in Tokyo, and carried the highest ever difficulty score of 7.4 in men's vault at the time under the 2009-2012 Code of Points (CoP). The difficulty score (D-score) of the "Yang" has been adjusted at the beginning of every quarter since, initially down to 6.4 under the 2012-2016 CoP and now down to 6.0 under the current 2017-2020 CoP. The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) regularly reassess and adjusts D-scores (typically) down due to the advancement of skills in gymnastics, especially on vault because of its D-scores being assigned numeric values instead of alphabetical representations, the only apparatus in gymnastics to do so. Yang is additionally said to be working on a second difficult vault, but this one is a sideways entry.

Yang was a reigning world champion, having won gold in vault at both the 2011 and 2013 World Championships in Tokyo and Antwerp respectively. However, at the 2014 World Championships in Nanning, China, he fell on both his vaults, failing to defend his title and placing seventh overall. He was similarly unable to defend his Olympic title at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro due to injury.

Yang currently shares the honour with Kenzo Shirai of Japan for having one of the two skills with the highest D-score of 6.0 in men's vault under the FIG's most current 2017-2020 CoP to be named after them. The "Yang" is a front handspring (forwards) entry family vault [as oppose to all of Shirai's vaults belonging to the Yurchenko or roundoff (backward) entry family], and it has a front handspring takeoff (forwards) onto the vaulting platform and then into a triple-twisting layout off the platform ending in a blind landing. So far, Yang and Shirai remain the only gymnasts who have successfully performed their respective version of the two most difficult vaults in the world.