Two-time Olympic figure-skater Michael Martinez is training even harder than when he did to prepare for the past two Winter Olympics qualifying events.
With a pair of new skates and new programs developed by his coach, Nikolai Morozov, Martinez said he has been training intensely for the past 3 months.
“He (coach) asked me, ‘Do you want to win? Do you want to be different?” I said yes,” Martinez said.
“Nicolai was pushing me so so much throughout the day, every day, with the new programs, new choreography. And it’s really different. It’s intense.”
The main goal is really to be able to have the enough training funds for up to at least for the qualifying event, and we’re just hoping that when we do qualify hopefully we do have some sponsors coming in and be able to have the enough support for all the way to the Olympics,” Martinez said.
‘Since the launching of the GoFundMe page in April, more than $6,000 have been raised for Martinez.
Meanwhile, Filipino gymnast Carlos Edriel Yulo recorded a confidence-boosting result in the parallel bars at the 2021 All Japan Apparatus Championships recently.
Yulo, 21, won bronze in the parallel bars with a score of 14.966.
“Great performance, Caloy! We can’t wait to see you defy gravity in the Olympics,” the national association said.
The Japan-based Yulo qualified for the Tokyo Olympics after advancing to the finals of the all-around in the 2019 World Artistic Gymnastics Championship in Stuttgart, Germany.
He made history in that same event when he won gold in the floor exercises, the first time that a Filipino has won a world championship in gymnastics.
He returned to the Philippines in 2019 to compete in the Southeast Asian Games, where he won gold in the floor exercises and the all-around, while securing silver in the pommel horse, still rings, vault, horizontal bar, and parallel bar. (Don Tagala, ABS-CBN North America News Bureau)
