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Naoya Tsukahara is a former Japanese Men’s Artistic Gymnastics (MAG) athlete who secured a team gold medal for Japan at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.
Naoya competed for Japan many times, including the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games and the 2003 World Championships, however he has now moved to Australia with his family and became an Australian citizen in 2013.
Naoya represented Queensland at the 2014 Australian Gymnastics Championships where he captured the All Around title and also represented Australia at the 2013 World Championships in Antwerp.
Naoya comes from a family of accomplished gymnasts and is the son of the former Japanese gymnast, Mitsuo Tsukahara, who was also a multi Gold Medallist in numerous Olympic Games throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Naoya participated at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and finished 12th in the final, as well as competing in the 1997 World Championships, where he won two bronze medals in All Around and on the Parallel Bars. At the 1999 World Championships he won a silver medal in the All-Around and on Parallel Bars.
Naoya is now 37 years old, an elder statesman in the gymnastics world. In 2014 he competed at his first Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the men's team coming fourth overall. Naoya competed in his seventh World Championship event in 2014, his second for Australia.
In 2015, Tsukahara took out his third consecutive All-Around gold medal, as well as helping Queensland to the teams’ gold.
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