Byline: CBC Sports
Calgarians Adam Wong and Nathan Gafuik will be flying high for Canada in the all-round gymnastics final at the Beijing Olympics (CBC, CBCSports.ca, 11 p.m. ET).
It is the realization of a dream for the pair, who were born nine months apart in 1985. Wong competed at the 2004 Athens Games but fell short of the all-round final, while Gafuik was an alternate for the Canadian team.
"We've had a few days to regroup and get our bodies feeling good and ready for the final," Wong told CBCSports.ca en route to practice on Wednesday in Beijing.
The accomplishment is made even more impressive by the fact that both have battled back from injuries in the past 18 months. It will also ease the sting from Canada finishing one spot shy of qualifying in the team competition.
"It would have been nice to be competing in the team final but doing the all-around competition will be a lot of fun," said Gafuik.
Canada is one of just seven countries sending at least two men into the all-around final, considered the biggest event in gymnastics. Romania and France, countries that finished ahead of Canada, only have one competitor.
In the all-round, the top 24 athletes from qualification each perform one routine on each apparatus, and scores from all six events are added together to determine the winners.
While injuries will always occur in such a physically gruelling sport, Canada was certainly dealt its share. More importantly, there simply isn't the depth that other countries boast to overcome too many of them.
Veteran Kyle Shewfelt performed admirably in the qualification considering he broke both knee caps this time last year, while Brandon O'Neill suffered an ankle injury on the eve of the Beijing competition that left him nowhere near the form that saw him win a silver medal at the 2005 worlds as well as several World Cup medals.
After winning gold in Athens in the floor, Shewfelt will find himself an enthusiastic supporter of Gafuik and Wong this time around.
"They've been working so hard in the past few months of training camps and they deserve to be in the all-around final and I think they're going to achieve best results for Canada there," said Shewfelt.
As so often happens in elite sport, the difference between the two pairs of gymnasts was timing. Wong and Gafuik suffered their injuries months before Shewfelt, let alone O'Neill.
Gafuik had wrist surgery in the spring of 2007, just weeks after Wong suffered a torn Achilles tendon that meant he had to sit out the worlds in Stuttgart in September.
The previous year, Wong had won the Commonwealth Games gold and finished ninth at the worlds in Denmark in the all-round, the best showing ever in the competition for a Canadian.
The injury set him back, but he had enough time to recover.
"I was able to really patient with it and make sure that it was 100 per cent before I started things on it again, so I've been able to come back and it doesn't bother me at all anymore," said Wong.
In Beijing, he has a large contingent of supportive relatives with him that reflect his Chinese, German and Scottish roots.
Wong and Gafuik definitely have room for improvement. Coach Tony Smith has said he expects them both to be integral members of the team competing for a spot at the 2012 London Olympics.
Shewfelt told Canwest Media Service last week that Gafuik has been a particular source of inspiration after being diagnosed in 2005 with Addison's disease, which can lead to adrenaline depletion and disorientation.
Gafuik and Wong finished in the bottom four of the 24 men who qualified for the final, but the slate are wiped clean in the final.
"I just want to stay focused and be relaxed when I get out there and hopefully be able to repeat my performance from the other night with a couple of cleaner events," said Wong.
Both were solid in the vault and parallel bars, with Gafuik's better floor routine a factor in finishing four spots higher than Wong, at 20th.
While the numbers taken out of context might not sound impressive, consider that Gafuik was just fifth in the all-round at the most recent Canadian championships.
He's not surprised by his Olympic result, however.
"I've known now for at least two months that I'd be competing all-around, so I've had a lot of practice getting ready to compete in six events and I knew I had a pretty good chance of making the final," said Gafuik.
The competition for the podium will be hotly contested.
Wei Yang of China was tops in qualifying, followed by Fabian Hambuechen of Germany and South Korea's Dae-Eun Kim.
Americans Sasha Artemev and Jonathan Horton showed they could be contenders, while Japan placed a trio of men in the top 10 - Kohei Uchimura, Koki Sakamoto and Hiroyuki Tomita.