Kohei Uchimura was born in Kitakyushu, Japan on January 3, 1989. His parents were both competitive gymnasts and had their own sports club, where he began training in gymnastics at the age of 3. At 15 years old, he moved to Tokyo to train with a gymnast gold medalist, Naoya Tsukahara.
In comparison with the famous Simone Biles, who dominated through high-difficulty skills, Uchimura was well known for his high execution scores. While he was capable of performing more difficult routines, Kohei simply wished to perfect and execute his routines perfectly. He has once said, “I could do harder things, but if I did then it would give me problems. So what I always try to do is strike a balance between technical difficulty and quality of execution. That’s where the beauty of gymnastics lies. I want to show through my performances how high scores can be achieved, by striving for beauty in execution. If you don’t do that, then it’s impossible to have an impact.”
Uchimura was highly capable of all events: floor, parallel bars, high bar, rings, vault, and pommel horse. He would win both all-round and individual titles consistently, winning 6 world titles (2009–2011 and 2013–2015). For example, in the 2011 World Championships, Uchimura won his third all-around final by a margin of 3.101 points! This is roughly the difference between second place and fourteenth place at that competition. He had the best performance on floor, rings, parallel bars, and pommel horse.
Uchimura also won 7 Olympic medals: 3 golds and 4 silvers. His first Olympics was in 2011 in Beijing representing Japan. He was 19 years old at the time. There, he won a silver medal for all-around and helped the team win silver. In 2012, he competed in the Olympics again, now dominating the all-around gold medal and a silver medal in floor. In 2016, he competed one more time, winning gold once again for all-around performance.
On January 10, 2022, Uchimura finally called for his retirement at age 32, which is well past the typical gymnast retirement age of their early twenties. He cited his retirement due to constant ankle injuries that would appear after his withdrawal from the 2017 World Championships where he initially injured it. Still, Kohei Uchimura is still considered to be the greatest male gymnast of all time.
