Olympic Men's Gymnastics 2016: Horizontal Bar Medal Winners, Scores and Results

Germany's Fabian Hambuechen went first in the men's horizontal bar final Tuesday and immediately set a standard none of his fellow competitors could match in order to secure the country's first gymnastics gold medal of the 2016 Summer Olympics. 

The United States' Danell Leyva earned silver with a clutch routine as the final athlete to perform in the eight-man championship round. Nile Wilson of Great Britain completed the podium by narrowly edging out American Sam Mikulak for the bronze.

Let's check out the complete results from the men's horizontal bar final:

Place	Athlete	Country	Score
Gold	Fabian Hambuechen	GER	15.766
Silver	Danell Leyva	USA	15.500
Bronze	Nile Wilson	GBR	15.466
4	Sam Mikulak	USA	15.400
5	Francisco Barreto Junior	BRA	15.208
6	Manrique Larduet	CUB	15.033
7	Epke Zonderland	USA	14.033
8	Oleg Verniaiev	UKR	13.366

And here's a look at the updated medal table from Rio:

Hambuechen had won gold on the horizontal bar in the World Championships, European Championships and European Games during his decorated career. An Olympic triumph eluded him, however, as he won bronze in 2008 and silver in 2012.

The hole on his otherwise strong resume is now gone. Samantha Peszek of NBC Olympics commented on the long-awaited victory for the 28-year-old German:

Interestingly, the same rules Hambuechen spoke out against earlier in the Games helped him capture the gold medal. The Telegraph passed along comments from the German star after a gruesome injury to France's Samir Ait Said and a fall by German team-mate Andreas Toba:

"

It's a pity that gymnastics has developed the way it has. Everyone is chasing more and more difficulty, more risk. Everyone wants new records so it's getting dangerous. That's really annoying. I don't like this system in gymnastics. I hope they will change it after Rio.

"

The current system is based on the equal weight of difficulty and execution, so there's an obvious advantage in trying to cram as much high-risk material as possible into a routine.

In the horizontal bar final, Hambuechen and Leyva were tied for the highest difficulty score, and they took home the top two medals. Yet they ranked third and fifth in execution, respectively.

Nevertheless, it marked the second medal of the day for Leyva, who also took home silver in the parallel bars earlier Tuesday.

What makes the results even sweeter for the 24-year-old veteran, who won an all-around bronze four years ago in London, is the fact he wasn't directly selected to the squad when it was originally chosen, as noted by former gold medalist Nastia Liukin of NBC Olympics:

Wilson and Mikulak had the same difficulty score in the race for bronze, so it came down to execution. The British sensation came out on top by less than one-tenth of a point.

Looking ahead, it will be interesting to see the development of Cuba's Manrique Larduet, who finished sixth. He entered the Games with a lot of hype as somebody with the potential to challenge dominant Japanese superstar Kohei Uchimura in the all-around competition.

An ankle injury forced him to miss the main individual event, however, and his performance in the two bars finals Tuesday were below expectations. He's still just 20, though. So there's still time to make one more serious run at Olympic success four years from now in Tokyo.