Recovering from a November surgery to correct his chronic sinusitis, Zonderland arrived on the Gold Coast almost a month early for the event, which is due to take place at Melbourne Arena from tomorrow through to Sunday (February 23).

The London 2012 Olympic horizontal bar champion rented a house with his team-mates and set out to regain the fitness that he had lost after a post-op month away from training.

"Since I started training on the apparatus again in mid-December, I have been slowly making progress again," Zonderland, a three-time world champion, said.

"Especially since I arrived in Australia, my fitness has been increasing.

"I’m not 100 per cent yet, but if it continues like this I will get there. 

"The climate has had a good effect on my health, and my training is already going better than before the World Championships."

At last year's World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in German city Stuttgart, Zonderland missed out on the horizontal bar final for the first time since 2015, and with it slipped away an opportunity to qualify directly to Tokyo 2020. 

That means the 33-year-old’s best chance of securing a place at the Olympics is now by winning the FIG World Cup series on his best event.

He faces stiff competition for that from Japan’s Hidetaka Miyachi, who won his third FIG World Cup title on horizontal bar in German city Cottbus in November, assuring him of a share of the series crown.

Zonderland, who has two FIG World Cup victories to his name, still has a chance to beat Miyachi for the title, but to begin with, he will need to get his own third win in the series. 

Melbourne will be the first time the two gymnasts have met at the same competition since last spring.

The Australian city is the sixth of eight stops in the 2019-2020 FIG World Cup series, a Tokyo 2020 qualifying event.

It has has drawn top specialists in every event, including Rio 2016 Olympic rings champion Eleftherios Petrounias of Greece, 2013 world pommel horse champion Kohei Kameyama of Japan and world team gold medallist Jade Carey of the United States.

Carey racked up FIG World Cup victories in vault and floor exercise throughout 2019, winning both events in Baku and Doha.

Unlike most of the events, there is no clear FIG World Cup points leader in balance beam.

Five gymnasts, including Australia’s Emma Nedov, have each won one title in the event, meaning the next three competitions will be the deciding factor in who gets the series title and the Olympic quota place that goes with it.

Last week, China withdrew from the FIG World Cup in Melbourne because of travel restrictions imposed by the Australian Government due to the coronavirus outbreak.

A 12-strong Chinese squad, including the likes of four-time world champion Zhang Chenglong, had been scheduled to travel to the event.

The Australian Government extended restrictions on foreign nationals travelling from China, first introduced earlier this month, by a further week last Thursday (February 13).