Double Olympic gymnastics champion Daiki Hashimoto longs to win a prize that has eluded him — a world-level team gold medal — and believes Japan can do it at the upcoming world championships in Liverpool if he and his teammates stick their landings.
"More than anything, I want to win team gold," Hashimoto, who won the Tokyo Olympics men's all-around and horizontal bar gold, said in a recent interview ahead of the championships that begin Saturday in England.
"We finished third at 2019 worlds. We settled for silver at the Tokyo Olympics, losing to the Russian Olympic Committee team by 0.103. I've been through enough disappointment."
The 21-year-old Hashimoto has become the face of Japanese gymnastics after the retirement of all-time great Kohei Uchimura.
"Landings will determine the outcome," Hashimoto said of the event, in which three of the five-man team compete on each of the six apparatuses. "We lost at the Olympics, despite doing well in all 18 (rotations). Three ROC gymnasts nailed landings on the vault but we couldn't. That made the difference."
This time, Russian athletes have been banned from worlds over their nation's invasion of Ukraine.
Hashimoto added that everyone on his team knows the importance of clean landings and have been training hard.
As for the individual all-around event, Hashimoto expects a tough test against Chinese defending champion Zhang Boheng, who he said is raising the bar.
"Zhang has raised his (difficulty) scores, while he is as perfect as he was last year. I look forward to competing against him for the title again. How well we do in the final event, the horizontal bar, will determine the colors of our medals," Hashimoto said.