The Cottbus World Cup in November 2019 was the first of four apparatus World Cups in the 2020 series that counted towards Olympic qualification for Tokyo. For specialists who had missed out on a place through the World Championships in Stuttgart, the series was the last realistic route to the Games.
Ukraine's weekend
Ukraine had an outstanding meet. Igor Radivilov won vault, Oleg Verniaiev won parallel bars, and Anastasia Bachynska took the women's floor title. For Bachynska the win carried extra weight. Ukraine's men had qualified a full team to Tokyo, but the women had not, and the one individual place already secured had gone to Diana Varinska through the all-around ranking. Bachynska, who had won floor at the European Games in Minsk that summer, needed World Cup points to earn her own route to Tokyo.
Others chasing Tokyo
The floor final also mattered to Italy's Lara Mori, who finished third, a tenth behind Germany's Kim Bui. Both were looking to secure Olympic places through their strongest apparatus.
On rings, Greece's Eleftherios Petrounias, the Rio Olympic champion, took silver behind China's Liu Yang and ahead of Armenia's Artur Avetisyan. Petrounias and Avetisyan had both missed out on Olympic spots in Stuttgart and needed the World Cup series to get to Tokyo.
What happened next
The series was disrupted by the pandemic in early 2020, and the remaining events were delayed into 2021. The qualification picture that began in Cottbus took more than a year to resolve, which made the early results even more valuable for the athletes who earned points before the shutdown.
Why this weekend is worth remembering
- It shows how the apparatus World Cup series offered a second route to the Olympics. - It captures a moment when Ukrainian gymnastics had medal contenders across several apparatus. - It reminds us how uncertain Olympic qualification became once the calendar was interrupted.
Read our Women's Artistic Gymnastics page and the archive entry for the 2019 European Games, where Bachynska won floor.
