PARIS: Japan’s Shinnosuke Oka claimed a shock victory in the Olympic men’s gymnastics all-around title on Wednesday in a thrilling final after a word in his ear from the man he dethroned, his compatriot Daiki Hashimoto.

Oka, 20, claimed gold ahead of Chinese duo Zhang Boheng in second, with Xiao Ruoteng taking bronze as a tearful Hashimoto finished sixth. In a gripping battle for gymnastics’ most coveted title, less than a point split the top three going into the last of the six rotations - the horizontal bar.

With the Bercy Arena crowd holding their breath the last to go Zhang, who was set for bronze, produced a huge performance. That left all eyes trained on the giant screen for his score to see if he had pulled gold out of the bag.

When it finally flashed up, Oka’s face lit up as his internal calculator worked out he had held on by just 0.233 points with an overall points tally of 86.832. Xiao, silver medallist behind Hashimoto at the Tokyo Games, was a further 0.235 points back.

Oka later revealed Hashimoto had whispered something to him before the tense concluding segment. "He kept telling me to be confident and try your best. So that helped, it gave me a lot of power,” the Olympic debutant disclosed.

He added: "I wanted to win, and if I beat Mr Hashimoto I thought I would win the gold - I did not make any mistakes so I feel great.” Oka’s unscripted success gave Japan an unprecedented fourth consecutive men’s all-around title after Hashimoto and Japanese icon Kohei Uchimura, the winner at London 2012 and four years later in Rio.

Most athletes will never experience the joy of having an Olympic gold medal hanging around their necks - Oka in contrast now has scooped up two in the space of 48 hours after he helped Japan to the team title at the Paris Games on Monday.

Zhang had looked razor sharp in qualifying, topping the list of 24 going through to the final ahead of Oka and Hashimoto. The Tokyo champion started as though he meant business, landing his tumbles on the opening floor exercise with such sure-footedness the judges could have been forgiven for wondering if he had glue on the soles of his feet.

Over to Zhang, who drew gasps of consternation from the Chinese contingent in the Bercy Arena with a fall at the start of his routine and a hop back on his last jump.

"Anything can happen in a competition,” shrugged Zhang. "In the floor exercise I made errors, but I pulled myself together and continued to work hard to catch up. "In the end I didn’t win the gold but looking back I believe I progressed personally. "To lose, that is normal, how you pick yourself up after you lose, that is a life lesson I want to learn.” 

The pommel horse was next for the six leading qualifiers—Hashimoto had fallen off the apparatus in Monday’s team competition—and he suffered the same fate again 48 hours later. He jumped straight back into the saddle to earn a decent 12.966 with a flurry of Russian circles and flairs.

But he moved onto the third rotation way down in 16th behind the new leader, Oka. At the midway point of the evening Ukraine’s Oleg Verniaiev, parallel bars champion and all-around silver medallist in Rio 2016, was just over one and a half points behind Oka.

But the 30-year-old Verniaiev grabbed the lead from Illia Kovtun after his favoured parallel bars to leave the war-torn country with dreams of a memorable 1-2 on the podium. A flawed performance on the horizontal bar by Verniaiev quickly ruined that prospect. Oka led the pack from Xiao and Zhang into the closing sixth rotation on the horizontal bar. And that’s how the podium panned out, but not before a nerve-wracking finale. — AFP