Brewer goes for hat-trick of golds
14th March 2006Gymnast Ross Brewer goes for a hat-trick of gold medals when he leads Team England’s defence of the men’s Commonwealth Games team title in Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena tomorrow evening (Thursday).
Brewer, a 26-year-old accountant from Wallington in Surrey, was a member of England’s gold medal winning teams at the last two Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur and Manchester.
The three-times British all-around champion is by far the most experienced member of the Team England men’s gymnastics squad. All of the four other members will be making their Commonwealth Games debuts tomorrow.
At 21, Dudley’s Ryan Bradley is the oldest of those. He won a team silver at the Commonwealth Youth Games in Edinburgh in 2000, as well as gold medals in the individual parallel bars and floor exercises.
Seventeen year-old Kristian Thomas, from Wolverhampton, and 16-year-old Louis Smith from Eye, near Peterborough, both have some junior international experience.
Thomas won gold on the parallel bars at the European School Games in 2004, and Smith took gold on the pommel at the European Junior Championships the same year.
The fifth member of the team, 18-year-old Luke Folwell, a student from Huntingdon, is making his international debut in Melbourne after becoming British under-18 all around and floor champion last year.
England will begin their quest on the vault, the first of the six disciplines. Only four members can compete on each individual piece of apparatus, and each team’s score is calculated by adding the best three of the four scores on each discipline to make the team total.
England will compete in the second subdivision of the competition, starting at 19.00 Melbourne time.