Great Britain's rhythmic gymnastics group fell agonisingly short of securing an Olympic Games place at the London Prepares test event at the North Greenwich arena.
The team missed the required benchmark score of 45.223 by just 0.273 marks in the group all-around competition, meaning British Gymnastics will not submit a nomination to the British Olympic Association for a host nation place at London 2012.



The qualification has been held over two days, and the GB team - Jade Faulkner, Francesca Fox, Lynne Hutchison, Louisa Pouli, Rachel Smith and Georgina Cassar - completed a clean ball routine on Monday to score 23.100, but fell just short of their target after they scored 21.850 in Tuesday's ribbon and hoop performance.





in full flow: The Swiss team perform during the rhythmic gymnastics qualification

'That score had to be achieved in qualification competition so our situation is that we will not be nominating a group to the BOA to be in the Olympic team for summer this year.
'We've got a very clear process and policy in place and there's no recourse on that.

'The benchmark was designed to do two things - to show they would have a level of credible performance and the second thing was that we would have a legacy for the future to push the sport forward.

'I think the girls have done a terrific job of raising their game and I think we're starting to show we can begin to compete in the group event but unfortunately this time they didn't achieve the benchmark we'd hoped for.'
The disappointment comes after an otherwise impressive performance by Britain at the test event, after the men's artistic team of Louis Smith, Daniel Keatings, Daniel Purvis, Max Whitlock, Kristian Thomas and Ruslan Panteleymonov sealed the first full berth for GB at an Olympic Games last week.




Olympics re-sale website to relaunch... but you can't buy leftover tickets until April! Now we're soaring! Oldham glad Team GB missed out in Tokyo




Share this article

Share