HE was part of the silver-medal winning Scottish men's gymnastics team at the 2014 Commonwealth Games and this weekend Frank Baines will return to Glasgow determined to wrap up the year in style.
HE was part of the silver-medal winning Scottish men's gymnastics team at the 2014 Commonwealth Games and this weekend Frank Baines will return to Glasgow determined to wrap up the year in style.
The 2012 European junior all-around champion will represent Britain in the Glasgow World Cup at Emirates Arena today ?? the only Scot to contest this year's event.
Baines, 19, is part of an eight-strong field of the world's top men's gymnasts which includes Oleg Verniaiev of Ukraine, the reigning world champion on parallel bars who took overall victory in the Stuttgart World Cup last weekend.
Also competing will be 2014 World Gymnastics Championships all-around bronze medallist Yusuke Tanaka from Japan as well as Olympians Sergio Sasaki Junior of Brazil and USA's John Orozco. James Hall, a Youth Olympic team and floor champion in 2013, will represent Britain.
Notably missing from the line-up, however, is German powerhouse Fabian Hambuechen, a six-time European champion and Olympic silver medallist, who withdrew last week and has been replaced by compatriot Helge Liebrich.
For Baines, it marks his World Cup debut and while palpably excited, the teenager is reticent to be seen as too bullish about over-selling his prospects this weekend.
"I think Oleg Verniaiev will be the strongest competitor there," he says. "He won the Stuttgart World Cup and was looking in great form. Then there's Yusuke Tanaka of Japan and Sergio Sasaki Junior from Brazil who are both very good too.
"It's always nerve-wracking competing in a big world event like this, but I'm looking forward to it. I'm just going to go out there to do the best I can. It's a high level of competition so if I do my routines clean I'll be happy with that."
Baines has had a remarkable journey over the past 16 months. In August last year, he sustained four fractured vertebrae in his neck and back after a fall while dismounting from the high bar in training.
Afterwards doctors told him he had a lucky escape as another gymnast, who suffered a similar accident a decade earlier, never walked again. Six weeks in a back brace followed as Baines battled to regain full fitness and compete at the Games.
The Liverpool-born gymnast, who has a Scottish father and an English mother, formed an integral part of the Team Scotland effort to claim silver at Glasgow 2014 and he himself came within a whisker of individual apparatus medals, finishing fourth on parallel bars and high bar.
He was part of the British team that flew to Nanning, China, for the 2014 World Gymnastics Championships in October, but as alternate didn't get a chance to compete. Even so, Baines was grateful for the chance to experience an event of that scale.
"I was in the training gym with all the other gymnasts so that was really good," he says. "Even though I wasn't competing I took a lot away from it."
Next year will see Glasgow host the event with the 2015 World Gymnastics Championships marking a major qualifier for the Olympic Games in Rio a year later.
"I would love to be part of the team," says Baines. "We will need to wait and see how the trials go next year, but that's the goal. The World Championships is definitely the main aim for 2015 so hopefully I'll be part of that. Anything after that is simply a bonus."
The women's line-up for this weekend's Glasgow World Cup includes former world champion and two-time Olympian Vanessa Ferrari of Italy and Romania's 2014 world all-around silver medallist Larisa Andreea Iordache, winner in Stuttgart last weekend.
Leading the charge for Britain will be 17-year-old Georgina Hockenhull, a double bronze medallist for Wales at Glasgow 2014. She replaces British senior all-around champion Rebecca Tunney who withdrew last week as a precaution to avoid aggravating a long-term injury.
The one-day event, which sold out in record time this year, will serve as a warm-up for the 2015 World Champion¬ships at the SSE Hydro next October.
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