Japan's Kohei Uchimura will be among 10 current and former gymnasts from seven countries who will visit Hiroshima ahead of May's Group of Seven summit to send a message of peace, International Gymnastics Federation President Morinari Watanabe said Wednesday.

Uchimura, the 2012 and 2016 Olympic men's all-around gymnastics champion, is from Nagasaki, the second city to suffer an atomic bomb attack after Hiroshima.

Kohei Uchimura waves to the crowd after his retirement event at Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium on March 12, 2022. (Kyodo)

Women's 2008 all-around Olympic champion Nastia Liukin of the United States and Britain's Giarnni Regini-Moran, the reigning men's floor exercise world champion, are among those who will take part in a series of events organized by FIG.

"It is an opportunity for the sporting world to make an appeal for 'No more Hiroshimas, no more Nagasakis,'" Watanabe, one of whose parents survived an atomic bombing, told a Tokyo press conference.

Members of "G-7 Gymnastics Hiroshima" will visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to lay flowers at the cenotaph of A-bomb victims on April 28 and meet junior and senior high school students the next day.

A talk is also planned with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, this year's G-7 chair, whose home constituency is Hiroshima.

"Considering the current state of the world too, it is a duty of the sporting world to raise voices hoping for world peace," Watanabe said.

Japan's 2020 Olympic floor bronze medalist Mai Murakami, Germany's 2012 men's all-around and parallel bars silver medalist Marcel Nguyen and Slovenia's Aljaz Pegan, the FIG Athletes' Commission president, are among the members.

The effort is backed by the Japan Gymnastics Association, the Foreign Ministry and Hiroshima's prefectural and municipal governments.


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