Kevin Tan rocks the rings

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

PHILADELPHIA -- Kevin Tan doesn’t love the still rings. His favorite gymnastics event is parallel bars.

But Tan, who grew up in Fremont, Calif., is so good on the rings that even coaches of other gymnasts say Tan is a lock to make the Olympic team. Tan scored a 16.550 on the rings today. It was the highest score of the night and his start value of 7.3 on the rings was the highest degree of difficulty attempted by anybody.

‘Nobody likes the rings best,’ Tan said. ‘I just happened to be good at them.’ Still rings requires the most upper body strength of any of the six disciplines. ‘Before my sophomore year in college, that’s when I got good at them,’ Tan said.

-- Diane Pucin