Barry Hearn spearheading plan to bring Simone Biles and Kohei Uchimura to London O2 Arena

Simone Biles
(Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
26 September 2016

Barry Hearn is hoping to lure the likes of Simone Biles and Kohei Uchimura for a gymnastics showpiece at London’s O2 next April.

Hearn, famous for raising the profiles of both darts and snooker, is hoping to have a similar effect on gymnastics after unveiling plans for the World Cup of Gymnastics.

The invitation event will be televised on Sky Sports and has already seen British medallists from Rio, Max Whitlock, Nile Wilson and Amy Tinkler, commit to it.

But with the best gymnasts in the world set to be on the invitation list, Hearn is confident he can lure stars from all over the globe.

“We will have an invitation out to both American and Japanese teams, so obviously Simone Biles and Kohei Uchimura would be welcome,” he told Standard Sport.

“Ultimately, that is up to their federations, but we’re offering them competition in front of sell-out crowds of 16,000 at the O2, so we’d be confident of getting the very best there.”

Hearn admitted he had been mulling over the idea for nearly 18 months and is hoping to tap into the popularity of the sport, which enjoyed a peak UK audience of 10.8million people during the Olympics.“We don’t want gymnastics to fall back to sleep for another four years and people to only get excited about it at the Olympics,” he added.

The event will be an all-around competition, with the men on six different apparatus and the women competing on four.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in