Marcel Nguyen

Marcel Nguyen
— Gymnast —
Personal information
Full name	Marcel Nguyen
Country represented	Germany
Born	(1987-09-08) 8 September 1987 Munich, Germany
Height	165 cm (5 ft 5 in)
Weight	119 lb (54 kg)
Discipline	Men's artistic gymnastics
Club	KTV Straubenhardt/TSV Unterhaching
Head coach(es)	Valery Belenky
Medal record Representing  Germany Olympic Games 2012 London All-Around 2012 London Parallel Bars World Championships 2007 Stuttgart Team European Championships 2010 Birmingham Team 2011 Berlin Parallel Bars 2012 Montpellier Parallel Bars 2008 Lausanne Team 2010 Birmingham Floor Exercise 2011 Berlin Horizontal Bar 2016 Bern Parallel Bars

Marcel Nguyen (born 8 September 1987) is a German gymnast. In 2012, he became an Olympic silver medalist after competing at the 2012 London Olympic Games. He's a soldier (currently ranked Corporal) in the Bundeswehr (German military) since July 2007, beginning when he was training in the Bundeswehr Sports Development Group (Sportfördergruppe der Bundeswehr) in Munich.^[1][2]

Sporting career

Born in Munich, to a German mother and a Central^[3] Vietnamese father, Nguyen began gymnastics at the age of four, and at seven years of age, joined TSV Unterhaching. Since 1995, he has trained at the regional training center in Munich. Since 1997, Nguyen was part of the squad perspective, where Andreas Hirsch and Jens Milbradt were his coaches. He rose quickly from the D- to B-squad. Since 2002, he has started for the Junior National Team. In 2005, Nguyen was the German junior champion on parallel bars, runner-up on rings and third in the vault. That same year he took part in the World Championships in Melbourne for the first time and placed 16th on the parallel bars. After the World Cup, Nguyen spent a year at the sports boarding school in Stuttgart in order to prepare with his teammates under the coaches Anatoli Jarmovski and Klaus Nigl for the 2006 World Championships in Aarhus.

In the 2012 London Olympic Games, Marcel won two Olympic silver medals after competing in the Men's artistic team all-around, floor and parallel bars. Marcel Nguyen collected the first all-around gymnastics medal for Germany since the 1936 Summer Olympic Games held in Berlin. At the European Championships in 2014, he placed 4th on the team, but failed to qualify for any of the individual finals. In September 2014, he was at the home championships in Stuttgart on parallel bars and rings which is where he tore his ACL.^[4]

After his ACL injury, he celebrated his comeback at German national championships in Giessen, where he was qualified to take part at the World Championships 2015 in Glasgow. Although the German team was not directly qualified for the Olympic Games 2016, Nguyen participated at the Test Event of Olympic Games in April 2016. The German team won that round and got the right to participate in the Olympics. The last events before Olympic Games were quite successful for Marcel Nguyen — the bronze medal on the parallel bars with 15,566 at the European Championships in Bern and gold at the German national championships at the rings. That was the 7th title of Marcel at this apparatus. For the first time since 2009, he did not win the gold medal on the parallel bar and stayed second behind his teammate Lukas Dauser. This caused the second ranking in the overall competition as well but saved the nomination to represent Germany in the Olympic Games 2016.

Olympic Games 2016 brought Marcel and his team the 7th place in overall teams ranking. During his routine on parallel bars, the new element was shown — "The Nguyen" is added to the Code of points (with a grade "E" which is higher as average) and brings 0,7 points to the athlete who completes it without mistake.^[5]

References

External links

• Nguyen's Official Homepage
• "Marcel Nguyen collected the first all-round gymnastics medal for Germany since 1936 when he took silver...", thelocal.de; accessed 9 September 2016.
• Profile, stuttgarter-zeitung.de; accessed 9 September 2016.(German)