Kenzō Shirai
Japanese gymnast
Kenzō Shirai (白井 健三, Shirai Kenzō; born August 24, 1996) is a Japanese retired artistic gymnast. He was a member of the gold medal winning teams at the 2016 Olympic Games and the 2015 World Championships. Individually he was the 2016 Olympic bronze medalist on vault, a three-time World Champion on floor exercise (2013, 2015, 2017), and the 2017 World Champion on vault.
Early life
Shirai was born in Yokohama, Kanagawa. Like his older brothers, he started gymnastics with parents Masaki and Norimi, first coaches and home club owners. Shirai said, "For as long as I can remember, I was a gym rat." Instead of paying day care, parents took him to their work. Practicing a six-hour session 5–7 days per week, Shirai attended regular school, which was atypical for an elite athlete. After he graduated Kishine High School in March 2015, he was accepted to attend/represent new home club of Nittaidai on the southern Tokyo border where other Japanese gymnasts also trained, including mentor Kōhei Uchimura.
Career
2013
Shirai, barely over 17 years of age, was the youngest male artistic gymnast participating at the 2013 World Championships in Antwerp. On floor exercise, he qualified in first with a score of 16.233, 0.633 points over Brazil's Diego Hypólito.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kenzō Shirai” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.