Filipa Martins just became the first Portuguese gymnast to qualify for the Olympic all-around final.
The all-around women’s gymnastics competition incorporates four different elements: the vault, uneven bars, balance beam, and floor exercise.
Filipa Martins, a 28 year-old gymnast born in Porto, achieved something that no other Portuguese gymnast has ever achieved. By completing a double-twisting Yurchenko on the vault, which is an extremely risky move, she managed to secure a place in the final, one of the 24 best scoring athletes.
Even though she had been practicing the double-twisting Yurchenko since 2014 or 2015, the move was so risky that she admitted to being a little scared. But the risk was worth the reward. Filipa managed to get a total score of 53.166, placing 18th out of the 60 competing athletes. As the score placed her within the first 24, she secured a place in the final, which will be on Thursday, August 1st.
Filipa has been competing at the highest level for a long time now and continues to fight, despite having gone through four operations on her right ankle. She even has a move in gymnastics named after her. “The Martins” was introduced to the public by Filipa for the first time at the 2021 European Championship in Basel on the uneven bars, her specialty, and has been attributed to her ever since.
This is her third appearance at the Olympics, and the third time has certainly been the charm. In Rio, in 2016, she was 37th, and in Tokyo, in 2020, she was 43rd. Now, as she will compete in the final, in the worst case scenario, she will finish in 24th place.
But Filipa expects an even higher finish for herself, and she is going all in. After working through her injuries, she is now making history. To win big, sometimes it is necessary to take a big risk.
Through her success and tenacity, Filipa hopes to blaze a trail for other Portuguese gymnasts. In her words, “We need to train a lot more, we need a lot more support and we don’t have it, so these processes take time and little by little I think that Portugal is growing a lot in our sport…Therefore, it is historic, not only because of what we did here, but because of the lack of support, in quotes, that we had, and we managed to do this.”
