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Andreas Bretschneider (born August 4, 1989) is a German artistic gymnast and member of the national team. He participated at the 2015 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Glasgow, and eventually competed for the German squad at the 2016 Summer Olympics, finishing seventh in the artistic team all-around tournament, and twentieth in the individual all-around.
Bretschneider has one competition-verified original skill named after him on the horizontal bar, officially named the Bretschneider or a double-twisting (tucked) Kovac. It has a difficulty score of "H" (0.9), formally the highest in men's gymnastics, and is only one of 4 skills–the Bretschneider on the horizontal bar, Liukin on floor by Valerie Liukin of the former Soviet Union, Shirai 3 on floor by Kenzo Shirai of Japan, and Whittenburg on rings by Donnell Whittenburg of the United States–with that assignment (the only one on high bar with the others on floor and rings). Bretschneider was once widely expected to advance the Bretschneider on the horizontal bar himself to layout in competition, and the skill was scored ahead of time by the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) and unofficially coined the Bretschneider 2 on the horizontal bar to better facilitate him as they awaited for the skill to be successfully completed in competition, but he had been unable to further compete it in a suitable setting since the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro due to injuries. Taking advantage of that in June 2017, Hidetaka Miyachi of Japan then beat Bretschneider to the punch and completed the first double-twisting layout Kovac or now the Miyachi on the horizontal bar, which was assigned the single highest previously structured but still-to-be-activated difficulty level of "I" (0.9), successfully on home soil at the 2017 Japan National Gymnastics Apparatus Championships in Takasaki, Japan.
On November 23–26, 2017, Bretschneider won the gold medal in the horizontal bar individual event final at the 2017 Cottbus World Cup in Cottbus, Germany, with a score of 14.566.