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U.S. takes fifth in men's Olympics gymnastics, Japan beats China for gold

RIO DE JANEIRO — The shuffling at the top has been slight and gradual, a rearranging of men's gymnastics powers.

Jake Dalton (USA) competes on the floor during the men's team final in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games at Rio Olympic Arena. (Photo: Robert Deutsch-USA TODAY Sports)

RIO DE JANEIRO — The shuffling at the top has been slight and gradual, a rearranging of men’s gymnastics powers.

Japan and China, kings of the sport for more than a decade, are jockeying more. Russia is resurging. Britain annually finds itself on the cusp.

Yet the Americans remain on the outside looking in.

Japan won the Olympic team final at Rio Olympics Arena on Monday, scoring 274.094 to win by more than 2.6 points over Russia in second. China, winners of 13 of the past 17 team titles dating back to 1994, took bronze.

The Americans scored 268.560 to finish fifth, a place they have held in three of the past five team competitions.

“For us, we need every tenth we can get,” said Chris Brooks. “It’s 3-up, 3-count. It’s pressure on everybody, no matter who are you are, what country you compete for. But they’re good at gymnastics. For decades and decades, they’ve been up in the podium, in the medals and we’re trying to learn a lot and get to that level in our program.”

Japan unseated China at last year’s world championships and showed that was not a fluke.

It helps to have Kohei Uchimura, but even the greatest male gymnast ever had been unable to lead Japan to a breakthrough until recently. It was the first Olympic team title of his career and first for Japan since 2004.

Russia, meanwhile, claimed its first Olympic medal since taking bronze in 2000, while China failed to win an Olympic team final for the first time since Athens.

The Americans pointed to higher start values for Japan and China, perennial powers in the sport, as well as the size of the pool of gymnasts and centralized training.

Mark Williams, the U.S. head coach, said the team did everything right over the past six months.

“But maybe we need to do it over the complete quad where every time we come into camps, there has to be accountability of what we’re going to do there,” said Williams, who is the coach at Oklahoma and Jake Dalton’s personal coach.

“I’m throwing out things because we want to get better. If we want to get on the medal stand, we’re gonna have to get better and we’ll figure it out.”

Team USA's Samuel Mikulak competes on the floor during the men's team final in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic Games at Rio Olympic Arena. (Photo: Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY Sports)

It’s not that the Americans haven’t been successful. They claimed team bronze medals at world championships in 2011 and 2014. The nine worlds medals they have in this quadrennium is the most for the program since the late 1970s.

But they found themselves in no better of a position than they were in London, where they qualified first and finished fifth.

“I am open to suggestions because we really were trying to fix the mistakes from four years ago,” said Williams. “At times, as an individual coach I’d say I was a little frustrated that we weren’t getting there fast enough, but I think we were getting on track. In a lot of ways, these guys performed better than I feel we did in London. We fought through everything and there was no giving up. It’s just gymnastics is hard and there are a lot of good teams out there on the men’s side.”

The Americans came into the night hopeful after qualifying second to China. But a series of mistakes put them in an early hole they couldn’t climb out of with three stellar final rotations.

On floor, Alex Naddour fell on his final tumbling pass and Sam Mikulak went out of bounds on his first two. Danell Leyva, Mikulak and Naddour stayed on pommel horse but scored lower than expected.

They had eight consecutive routines with scores greater than 15 on vault, parallel bars and high bar before Leyva fell off high bar on the final event of the night. But it was too little too late as they were more than 5.5 points behind the Japanese in first and 2.562 points off the podium.

“I’m proud of the guys, but we’re obviously upset of the outcome,” said Dalton. “We had a better outcome in mind, but that just didn’t quite happen today. It’s just frustrating because we put everything we could into training to be ready on this specific day. We had a great prelims, and it just wasn’t our day again in finals.”

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