Olympics gymnastics: Team bronze for Britain after appeal 
 
 Great Britain's men won an astonishing Olympic bronze medal in the gymnastics team final - having originally taken silver before a Japanese appeal. They had begun on their strongest suit, the pommel horse, where Louis Smith lowered his difficulty level to ensure a routine of care and precision and with fine contributions from Daniel Purvis and Max Whitlock their apparatus total of 45.932 was a fantastic start to competition. They were unhappy with the pommel horse score awarded to Kohei Uchimura and were elevated above Britain, after lengthy deliberation by the officials, with Ukraine missing out on a bronze medal in the process. Having qualified their men's and women's teams in first place for the only time in history, they had a veneer of invincibility and their first team title since 1984 seemed a likelihood. In the end, however, Britain's bronze, hard fought and stylishly won, will be a result that goes down in the history books. But they had problems on pommel horse, putting in two low scores, and after a recovery on rings, all rested on the vault, where they were expected to score high. China came into the event as defending world and Olympic champions, while Japan's gymnasts have been an improving world power for years, led by gymnastics superstar Uchimura. As the tension mounted, Oldham endured a costly fall on the high bar - a repeat of his error at last year's World Championships - only for Thomas to throw everything at his high bar routine to keep hopes alive.
– China easily took the gold medal in the men's gymnastics final today, but who got silver was a matter of some controversy. When the event was first concluded, Britain stood at an astonishing second place, followed by the Ukraine. But Japan, sitting in fourth, launched an appeal, complaining that their pommel horse score was too low—and the judges ultimately agreed, bumping them all the way up to silver, the BBC reports. Even a bronze medal represented a huge upset for Britain—before the event "nobody would talk in more than hushed tones of a bronze medal, let alone beating Japan," writes Ollie Williams of the BBC. But boos rained down on the Japanese as they accepted their medals anyway, the Guardian reports. The highly-touted US squad, incidentally, finished a disappointing fifth, according to the San Jose Mercury News.