Agony for Joe Fraser as GB men finish fourth
Joe Fraser and GB men’s gymnastics suffered more Olympic heartbreak after finishing fourth in the team final for the third consecutive Games.
The British men were beaten to bronze by the USA on a thrilling evening at the Bercy Arena in Paris, which ended with Japan snatching gold from rivals China at the death.
Fraser and his team, led by three-time Olympic gold medallist Max Whitlock, performed solidly throughout but could not match the scores of a US squad backed by the vast majority of the crowd.
A score of 15.266 from two-time defending Olympic pommel horse champion Max Whitlock on that piece of apparatus got GB’s bid for a medal off to a flying start after Fraser and Jarman had opened with solid routines.
Fraser then improved on his qualifying score on the rings, generally considered one of the team’s weaker pieces, before Hepworth boosted the score with an excellent routine which scored 14.800.
GB were fifth after two of six rotations but the margins were tight and the vault gave them an opportunity to make up ground.
Jarman, the 2023 world champion, delivered a score of 15.200 while the 20-year-old Hepworth continued his own excellent individual debut Games by posting 14.966.
That moved GB up to third at the midway point of the competition but their advantage over Ukraine and a Japan team who had seen Daiki Hashimoto fall off the pommel horse was slender.
And while the routines on parallel and high bars were solid from GB, they were not quite good enough to close the gap on the US.
GB went into the final rotation on the floor needing to make up almost four points to claim a medal, with the Americans on the pommel. They managed half of it but it was not quite enough.