Lord of the rings

For David Kikuchi, everything’s riding on Friday.

Nursing an injured elbow, the Dalhousie grad says his berth on the Canadian men’s gymnastics squad heading to the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing is contingent of whether he can complete his events at a pre-Olympic training camp in Calgary and prove to the national coaches that he’s good to go.

“The bones are out of place a little bit, just enough to be quite bothersome,” says Mr. Kikuchi, who was seeing Halifax osteopath Peter Goodman. “A week ago it was pretty sore, but this week in practice it felt pretty good.”

"I'm sure it would be weird if someone else just popped into my body, but for me it's just what I do." — gymnast David Kikuchi

Sounding confident and upbeat just as he left the airport from his Fall River home, Mr. Kikuchi is one of the veterans on the Canadian squad. At the age of 28, he’s the oldest on the team heading to Beijing, which also includes 2004 Olympic floor exercise champion Kyle Shewfelt (back after a devastating injury in which he broke the tibias in both of his legs 10 months ago) Nathan Gafuik, Grant Golding and Adam Wong, all from Calgary, and Brandon O’Neill of Edmonton.

A mainstay of the men’s national team, he represented Canada at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens and was a member of Canada's squad at the 2006 world championships. At the Canadian championships held in Calgary in June, he placed first in the rings—there’s a reason why he’s called “Lord of the Rings”—and second in pommel horse, parallel bars, horizontal bar and all around competition.

He says going to Dalhousie to study mathematics and statistics just as he started training full-time benefits him now. He’s organized and works hard to keep balance in his life. As well as training for the Olympics, he works for RBC in Halifax (he’s one of 28 RBC Olympians) and is a provincial gymnastics coach. Since the age of seven, his own coach has been his father, Tak Kikuchi.

His says the team is business-like and focused with the Olympics just 22 days away.

“We’ve got a job to do,” says Mr. Kikuchi, who adds teams from China and Japan provide the toughest competition. “We know what it takes to get there and we know what it’s going to make it to the podium.”