Dominick Cunningham | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Full name | Dominick Adam Cunningham | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Country represented | Ireland | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Former countries represented | Great Britain England | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Born | Birmingham, England | 9 May 1995||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Discipline | Men's artistic gymnastics | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Level | Senior Elite | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Years on national team | 2013–present | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Club | City of Birmingham GC | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Medal record
|
Dominick "Dom" Adam Cunningham (born 9 May 1995) is an English-born elite artistic gymnast representing Ireland since 2022, [1] having previously represented Great Britain and England. [2] He won a team gold at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, and the Individual Floor Gold at the 2018 European Championships in Glasgow. [3] [4]
Cunningham was born in Birmingham and is from Kings Heath, a suburb in the south of the West Midlands city. [5] [6] He attended Bishop Challoner Catholic College in Birmingham until 2013. [7]
As a child, Cunningham played football and ice hockey but was captivated by gymnastics the most. His parents supported his interest despite struggling to pay his gymnastics fees. His mother took him to his first gymnastics session aged 5. He started competitions at age 7. He also took some boxing lessons. [8] [9]
Cunningham was regularly bullied at primary school for participating in gymnastics and was subjected to name-calling. Labelled "gay" and accused of taking up a "girls' sport", he has said he felt humiliated and hid in his mother's car, refusing to go into school. Cunningham said "I was only about 9 or 10 years old at the time and I didn't want to go to school because people were calling me names because of what sport I did. I felt humiliated really. I remember just coming home and crying about it." [10]
Cunningham has trained at City of Birmingham Gymnastics Club in Perry Barr [11] [12] [13] and the Earls Gymnastics Club in Halesowen. [14]
Cunningham had success at the junior level at the 2013 Australian Youth Olympic Festival and the 2011 European Youth Olympic Festival. [15]
Cunningham was a member of the British team for the 2017 European Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Cluj-Napoca, Romania in April 2017, advancing to the floor exercise and vault event finals. [16]
At the 2018 Commonwealth Games held in Gold Coast, Australia, Cunningham was part of the team that won gold on the men's all-around event. [17] Although he finished third in the all-around team event behind Nile Wilson and James Hall, he did not qualify for the individual all-around as only two competitors from each country may qualify. [18] He won a bronze on the vault. [19]
Cunningham attended the official handover ceremony at the 2018 Commonwealth Games as an ambassador representing his home city of Birmingham, which will be hosting the 2022 Commonwealth Games. [20] [21] [22]
At the 2018 European Championships in Glasgow, Cunningham won gold in the floor exercise. [23] He also won a silver as part of the team. [24]
In his first World Championships at the 2018 World Championships in Doha, Qatar, Cunningham narrowly missed out on a bronze medal by 0.009 marks in the men's vault final. [25]
Cunningham sustained a leg injury at the 2019 European Championships in Poland, which left him on an 18-week rehabilitation programme to be able to walk again. [26] [27]
At the 2019 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships held in Stuttgart, Germany, Cunningham was part of the team that finished in fifth place in qualifications, qualifying the Great Britain team a place at the 2020 Summer Olympics. [28] Cunningham and the team went on to retain their fifth place in the team final. [29] Individually, Cunningham qualified to the floor exercise final where he placed eighth (13.566) and the vault final where he placed fifth (14.566). [30]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Cunningham revealed he was struggling to train without use of gyms during UK lockdown periods. Describing the training situation for gymnasts as "impossible", he took to training at a stable in Walsall to prepare for the delayed 2020 Summer Olympics being held in Tokyo in 2021. [31] [32]
In early 2022 Cunningham officially switched nationalities and began representing Ireland, his father's birth nation. Shortly thereafter he was selected for his first Irish team at the 2022 European Men's Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Munich. [1] [33]
Louis Antoine Smith MBE is a retired British artistic gymnast.
Daniel Ryan Keatings is a retired British artistic gymnast representing Scotland and Great Britain. Both an all-around gymnast and a specialist pommel horse worker, Keatings was the first male British gymnast to medal at the all-around competition at the World Championships, and the first male British gymnast to become a European champion, winning on pommel horse, his signature piece, in 2010 in Birmingham and again in 2013 in Moscow. In 2014, he won gold at the Commonwealth Games, again in pommel horse, for Scotland. With Louis Smith, Max Whitlock and Joe Fraser of England and Great Britain, and Rhys McClenaghan of Northern Ireland and Ireland, Keatings formed part of a golden generation of home nations pommel horse workers who dominated the apparatus at global, continental and Commonwealth Games level from 2010 onwards.
Sam Joshua Oldham is a retired English artistic gymnast who represented Great Britain. He was part of the British men's team at the 2012 Summer Olympics that won bronze in the team competition. He is also a three-time junior European champion and won individual horizontal bar gold at the 2010 Summer Youth Olympics in Singapore.
Max Antony Whitlock is a British artistic gymnast. With fourteen medals and six titles in Olympic and World Championships, Whitlock is the most successful gymnast in his nation's history. He is also the most successful pommel horse worker in Olympic Games history, with two gold medals and one bronze.
Daniel Scott Purvis is a Scottish former international elite artistic gymnast, and three-time British all-around champion in men's artistic gymnastics. He trained at Southport YMCA and was coached by Jeff Brookes and Andrei Popov. He was part of the first British men's team to win a medal at a World Championships in 2015.
Kristian James Thomas is a British former artistic gymnast. A long-standing member of both the England and Great Britain men's teams, he was a member of the British team that won gold in the 2012 European Championships team event, and a historic bronze in the same event at the 2012 Summer Olympics. He won his first global individual medal in the 2013 World Championships, a bronze in vault; it was also the first global medal ever won in vault by a British male gymnast. In 2015 he won his first major international title, gold in the floor exercise at the 2015 European Artistic Gymnastics Championships.
Claudia Fragapane is a retired British artistic gymnast. She came to prominence at the 2014 Commonwealth Games, where she was the first English woman to win four gold medals in a single Games since 1930. In 2015, Fragapane was part of the women's gymnastics team that won Great Britain's first-ever team medal, a bronze, at the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, before winning an individual world championship bronze on floor two years later.
Elissa Rebecca "Ellie" Downie is a retired artistic gymnast who has represented Great Britain. She is the all-around 2017 European gymnastics champion, the first gymnast to win a major all-around title for Great Britain.
Nile Michael Wilson is a former British artistic gymnast. He won an Olympic bronze medal in the men's horizontal bar at the 2016 Summer Olympics; he was a world medallist as a member of the silver-medal winning British team at the 2015 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, the first world men's team medal in British gymnastics history. A five-time Commonwealth Games champion, he won the all-around title in 2018, and is a former European horizontal bar champion, the first Briton to win the title. In January 2021, Wilson announced his retirement from competitive gymnastics due to injuries and mental health concerns. In March 2023, he won the fifteenth series of Dancing on Ice with dance partner Olivia Smart.
Kelly Jay Simm is an English artistic gymnast. She is the 2015 Summer Universiade all-around champion, vault silver medalist, and floor bronze medalist. She represented England at the 2014 Commonwealth Games and won a gold medal in the team final. She competed at the 2015 World Championships and she won the bronze medal with the team.
Giarnni Regini-Moran is a British artistic gymnast representing Great Britain and England internationally. He is the 2022 world champion on floor exercise and the fourth British world champion in the sport of artistic gymnastics.
Courtney James Matthew Winston Tulloch is a currently active English international artistic gymnast, representing Great Britain and England since 2012, and is a specialist in still rings and vault.
Brinn John Bevan is a Welsh artistic gymnast. He was part of the first men's team from Great Britain to win a team medal at a World Gymnastics Championships in Glasgow on 28 October 2015. He was part of the British team to compete in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
Rhys Joshua McClenaghan is a Northern Irish artistic gymnast competing internationally for both Ireland and Northern Ireland. He is a double world champion on pommel horse, having won gold in 2022 and 2023, the first Irish artistic gymnast ever to win world championship gold. In 2019, he became the first Irish gymnast to qualify to a world championships final and to also win a medal, taking bronze on pommel horse.
Marios Georgiou is a Cypriot artistic gymnast. He is the 2022 European horizontal bar champion and the first gymnast from Cyprus to win a European title. He is the 2019 European Championships all-around bronze medalist which made him the first gymnast from Cyprus to win a European medal. He is the 2019 European Games parallel bars silver medalist. At the 2018 Commonwealth Games, he won the gold medals in the floor exercise and parallel bars and the bronze medal in the all-around, and he won four bronze medals at the 2022 Commonwealth Games. He is the 2018 Mediterranean Games all-around and horizontal bar champion and the 2022 Mediterranean Games horizontal bar champion. He competed at the 2016 and 2020 Olympic Games.
Alice Nicole Kinsella is an English artistic gymnast and member of the British national gymnastics team. She represented Great Britain at the 2020 Summer Olympics and won a bronze medal in the team event, and was part of the Great Britain team that achieved the highest positions ever achieved in the same event at the 2022 World Championships (silver) and the 2023 European Championships (gold). Kinsella won a Commonwealth Games team title as part of England's gold-winning team all-around squad of 2022.
James Robert Hall is an English artistic gymnast. A member of the English and British Senior teams since 2014, he has best known as an all-around and team gymnast, having won all-around bronze and team gold and silver in the European Artistic Gymnastic Championships and two team golds and an individual all-round silver in the Commonwealth Games. His signature piece is horizontal bar, in which he has won silver at the 2022 Commonwealth Games
Georgia-Mae Fenton is an English artistic gymnast and a member of both the British national gymnastics team and the England Commonwealth Games gymnastics squad. She is the 2018 and 2022 Commonwealth champion on uneven bars, and a member of the gold medal-winning England team in 2022. With Great Britain, she was part of the team that won silver at both the 2022 European Women's Artistic Gymnastics Championships and 2022 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, before winning the gold medal, the first for a British women's team, at the 2023 European Artistic Gymnastics Championships.
Joe Fraser is an English artistic gymnast. He is the 2022 European all-around and parallel bars champion and the 2019 world champion on the parallel bars, the first British gymnast to ever win gold in any of these events. As a member of the British Senior team since 2017, he has also won team gold and silver, and bronze on the pommel horse, in the European Artistic Gymnastic Championships. Representing England in the 2022 Commonwealth Games, Fraser won three gold medals in team, pommel horse and parallel bars.
Jake Jarman is an elite English artistic gymnast from Peterborough, competing internationally for Great Britain, and for England at the Commonwealth Games. In his first major senior championships, the 2022 Commonwealth Games, Jarman won the gold medal in the team all-around, individual all-around, floor exercise and vault, the first English male gymnast to win four gold medals at a single Games. A few weeks later in Munich, representing Great Britain, Jarman became European champion in the team and vault events, becoming the first British male to win European gold on vault. In 2023, Jarman added vault gold at the 2023 World Championships, the first Briton to win world gold on the apparatus, the fourth male British world champion, and sixth British world champion.