Zou Jingyuan is a specialist in an era that rewards specialists. He does not compete for the all-around crown. Instead he is the reference point on one apparatus, the parallel bars, and a major scorer for China on rings.
The parallel bars record
Zou won his first world title on parallel bars in Montreal in 2017. He added further world titles in 2018, 2022 and 2025, and Olympic titles in Tokyo and Paris. His 16.233 in the Tokyo 2020 final was the highest score of any gymnast in any event at those Games, and his winning margin there, 0.533, was the widest of the competition. In Liverpool in 2022 he scored 16.166, again the best score of the championships.
Those numbers matter because execution scores above 9.0 on a high-difficulty parallel bars routine are rare. Zou's routines are long, fluid and very hard to deduct, which is why he has stayed ahead of rivals with similar difficulty.
Rings and the Zou element
Zou is also a world-class rings worker. He won Olympic silver on rings in Paris behind team-mate Liu Yang, and has an element in the Code of Points named after him: a slow lower from inverted cross to inverted hang, followed by a backward felge to a held V-cross.
Team medals
With China he has won world team gold in 2018 and 2022, Olympic team bronze in Tokyo and Olympic team silver in Paris. In 2026 he helped China win the Asian Games team title and took parallel bars gold and rings bronze.
Rotterdam 2026
China's men compete in the fifth qualification subdivision on Sunday 18 October. For China's team total, Zou's parallel bars and rings are two of the most reliable big scores in the field. Individually, a fifth world title on parallel bars would put him further ahead of anyone in the modern history of the event.
