SA’s Commonwealth champion gymnast Chris Remkes out of Tokyo Olympics with knee injury
Commonwealth champion Chris Remkes should be gearing up for a tilt at an Olympic medal. Instead the SA gymnast is recovering from the horror injury which shattered his Tokyo 2020 dream.
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Chris Remkes should be gearing up for the World Gymnastics Championships and a tilt at an Olympic medal next year.
Instead SA’s Commonwealth champion was sweating it out by himself in a Canberra gym, recovering from the serious knee injury which had shattered his Tokyo dream.
Remkes would be forced to watch on TV next week, as his national teammates took on the globe’s top talents in Stuttgart, Germany, and worked towards the 2020 Games.
He said the pain of the setback was kicking in, six months after a mistimed landing at a World Cup meeting ruptured his ACL and ruled him out of the Olympics.
“It’s pretty sad and upsetting,” said Remkes from the AIS, where he was in the midst of an intensive rehabilitation program.
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“I don’t have a chance now (for the Olympics), which really sucks.
“I screwed up my knee pretty bad and they even said at the hospital that I did a decent job of it.
“All injuries are annoying, but there’s no point crying over it.
“I know when I come back, I’ll be stronger than I was before.”
Remkes shot to prominence on the Gold Coast last April, when he won gold in the vault to end Australia’s 24-year Commonwealth Games drought in the event.
It followed a remarkable journey for the 147cm, 47kg pocket-rocket, who spent the first two years of his life in a Filipino orphanage, before being adopted by an Adelaide couple.
But his rapid rise to the top of the vault world rankings came to a crashing halt in Doha, Qatar, in March.
Midway through his routine in the floor final, Remkes came up short landing a double-twisting triple somersault and immediately knew he was in trouble.
“As I was coming down, I just had a bad landing,” Remkes, 23, said.
“I felt it was a bit short, but nothing out of the ordinary.
“Then as I landed there was a massive crunch in my knee and I felt my it pop out.
“It was a bit of a disaster.
“When I was doing warm-ups for it (floor routine), it was actually the best one I’ve done in a very long time, but then I just bummed out in the comp.
“It was pretty sore at the time, but because of the adrenaline and the shock I kind of just remained as calm as I could.”
The Happy Valley-raised athlete returned to Australia for surgery to repair his ACL using a hamstring tendon graft and trim his heavily-damaged meniscus.
He had since spent up to five hours daily in the gym, rebuilding the strength in his left knee while continuing to hone his upper-body gymnastics techniques.
Remkes hoped to progress to light tumbling and landing by the end of the year, but said next July’s Tokyo Games would come too soon to reach the qualifying standards required.
The former Hamilton Secondary College student had already set his sights on the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games and Paris Olympics two years later.
“It’s probably motivated me more,” said Remkes, who planned to expand his repertoire of apparatuses to compete in all-around events.
“Not being able to do gymnastics in quite a while, kind of makes me want to push myself a little bit more now.
“I haven’t done any running or jumping on the hard ground just yet, but the strength is coming back through weights and I’m feeling more confident with the knee now.
“Our main focus now is coming back to competition form, but looking more forwards to the next Commonwealth Games and hopefully the next Olympic cycle.”