World champion Fan Ye dazzled to lead China storm to gold at the 23rd Universiade women's gymnastics team competition.

With Fan scoring highest among all competitors in two apparatus and second in another, the Chinese women embraced their third straight Universiade gymnastics team title with a total of 110.258 points, eclipsing silver medalist DPR Korea by 4.986 points.

Russia came in third with 104.998.

It was also the first gold medal of China in Izmir, who topped gold medal tally in the last two Universiades.

Fan led all-round qualifying with a score of 36.836 points, ahead of Britain's Elizabeth Tweddle on 36.550 points. She also qualified for the finals of the beam, uneven bars, in which she topped the judges' scoring, and floor exercise, where she was awarded the second best mark.

"Fan has been in dazzling form recently," said China head coach Liu Guicheng. "She really helped us in the team competition."

Fan, the 2003 world beam champion, attributed China's victory to team efforts.

"We are all veterans and very familiar with such level of competitions," Fan said. "We just tried our best and the results were even better than we expected."

China started strongly in the team competition, which had attracted ten teams, taking the lead over Ukraine after the first rotation with 27.949 after Fan scored 9.412 on the beam and Zhang Nan and Liu Danxia added 9.387 and 9.150 respectively.

Following Ukraine's indifferent performance in its next two rotations, the Chinese women enlarged their lead to 2.786 points after three rotations before Fan performed a near-flawless routine in the eleven bars to win an identical highest score of 9.500 and seal the victory for her team.

"We did not expect to win so easily," said Liu. "Other strong teams did not perform to their best while consistency was the key to our victory."

(Xinhua News Agency August 13, 2005)