Uchida looked like she was on a mission each time she walked onto the carpet in the finals, which clearly showed with her strong scores across all four apparatus, including a personal best score of 20.000 for her clubs routine.
“This year has been going really, really well,” said Uchida following the competition. “So coming into this competition I felt really confident – maybe too much, and I really kind of messed up on the first day, and since then I’ve just been trying to make up for it. And today, I’m so happy, I feel like I nailed all of my routines and I had a really strong finish.”
Heading into today’s competition, Uchida was actually trailing first-year senior Natalie Garcia of Mississauga, who looks to have made a seamless switch to the senior ranks following a stellar career as a junior which was capped off by representing Canada at the 2018 Youth Olympic Games last summer. Garcia ended up taking the silver medal in the all-around competition and was happy with her result.
“I worked really hard for this, and being a first-year senior it’s not easy so I’m pretty happy with that,” said Garcia who was the 2018 Canadian Junior AA champion. “My routines got a lot harder, we added more difficulty to every routine, and I also needed to be more precise and really work on my mental training – I think I’ve gotten a lot better at that – I’m a bit more confident in myself which has enabled me to do better.”
Uchida finished the day with a total score of 145.850, while Garcia had a total score of 142.000, and last year’s all-around champion – Sophie Crane of Toronto scored 137.250 to capture bronze.
In the junior category, Vivier retained the lead she had from the first two days of competition and walked away with the all-around title with a total score of 130.850. Elizabeth Savchenko from Montreal captured all-around silver with a total score of 125.700, while Tatiana Cocsanova, also of Montreal, took bronze with a total score of 124.850. Interestingly, all three athletes tied for the gold medal with their clubs routines, while they traded off for top position in the other apparatus – Vivier took gold in rope, Savchenko in ball, and Suzanna Shahbazian, also from Questo RG, took gold in ribbon.
“The competition went pretty well,” said Vivier who took the AA title at the 2019 Elite Canada competition in February. “Today was a little tough because I was pretty tired from the first two days, but I’m most proud of my ribbon routine because we changed it recently, and doing it clean made me really happy because it was stressful, but I got through it.”
In the FIG Junior Group competition, it was Glimmer Athletic Club who took the gold medal with a total score of 58.850, over Trillium Rhythmic who took silver with a total score of 54.550, and Silhouettes of York who took bronze with a total score of 44.150.
Next up for some of these athletes will be the very first Junior World Championships to be held this July in Moscow, the Pan Am Games in Lima in August, and the Senior World Championships this September in Baku, AZE. All teams to be named at a later date.
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