Gymnastics

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This article is about the general sport. For a specific form of gymnastics, see Gymnastics (disambiguation).

 
Gymnastics is a sport involving performance of exercises requiring physical strength, flexibility, agility, coordination, balance, grace and passion for the sport. Internationally, all of the gymnastic sports are governed by the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG) with each country having its own national governing body affiliated to FIG. Competitive Artistic gymnastics is the best known of the gymnastic sports. It typically involves the women's events of uneven parallel bars, balance beam, floor exercise, and vault. Men's events include floor exercise, pommel horse, still rings, vault, parallel bars, and high bar. Gymnastics evolved from exercises used by the ancient Greeks, that included skills for mounting and dismounting a horse, and from circus performance skills.
Other gymnastic sports include rhythmic gymnastics, the various trampolining sports, aerobic and acrobatic gymnastics.
Participants can include children as young as five years old doing kindergym and children's gymnastics, recreational gymnasts of ages 5 and up, competitive gymnasts at varying levels of skill, and world class athletes.

History

1908 Summer Olympics in London: Display of the British women's gymnastics team

Exercises of the ancient Greeks began with athletic feats performed by each individual according to his own notion. The youth were encouraged to combine amusement with exercise. In time, this kind of exercise was incorporated into a system that figured prominently in the state regulations for education. In fact, the period for exercise or gymnastics was equal to the time spent on art and music combined.^[4] All Greek cities had a gymnasium, a courtyard for jumping, running, and wrestling.
As the Roman Empire ascended, the Greek gymnastics gave way to gymnastics whose purpose was military training. The Romans, for example, introduced the wooden horse.
In 393 AD the Emperor Theodosius abolished the Olympic Games, which by then had become corrupt and gymnastics, along with other sports, declined. For centuries, gymnastics was all but forgotten.^[5]
In the fifteenth century, Girolamo Mercuriale from Forlì (Italy) wrote De Arte Gymnastica, that brought together his study of the attitudes of the ancients toward diet, exercise and hygiene, and the use of natural methods for the cure of disease. De Arte Gymnastica also explained the principles of physical therapy and is considered the first book on sports medicine.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Germany, two pioneer physical educators – Johann Friedrich GutsMuths (1759–1839) and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) – created exercises for boys and young men on apparatus they had designed that ultimately led to what is considered modern gymnastics. In particular, Jahn crafted early models of the horizontal bar, the parallel bars (from a horizontal ladder with the rungs removed), and the vaulting horse.^[5]
The Federation of International Gymnastics (FIG) was founded in Liege in 1881.^[6] By the end of the nineteenth century, men's gymnastics competition was popular enough to be included in the first "modern" Olympic Games in 1896. From then on until the early 1950s, both national and international competitions involved a changing variety of exercises gathered under the rubric, gymnastics, that would seem strange to today's audiences and that included for example, synchronized team floor calisthenics, rope climbing, high jumping, running, horizontal ladder. During the 1920s, women organized and participated in gymnastics events. The first women's Olympic competition was primitive, for it involved only synchronized calisthenics, was held at the 1928 Games, in Amsterdam.
By 1954, Olympic Games apparatus and events for both men and women had been standardized in modern format, and uniform grading structures (including a point system from 1 to 15) had been agreed upon. At this time, Soviet gymnasts astounded the world with highly disciplined and difficult performances, setting a precedent that continues. The new medium of television helped publicize and initiate a modern age of gymnastics. Both men's and women's gymnastics now attract considerable international interest, and excellent gymnasts can be found on every continent. Nadia Comăneci received the first perfect score, at the 1976 Summer Olympics held in Montreal, Canada. She was coached in Romania by the Romanian coach, (Hungarian ethnicity), Béla Károlyi. Comaneci scored four of her perfect tens on the uneven bars, two on the balance beam and one in the floor exercise. Even with Nadia's perfect scores, the Romanians lost the gold medal to the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Comaneci became an Olympic icon.
In 2006, a new points system for Artistic gymnastics was put into play. With an A Score (or D score) being the difficulty score, which as of 2009 is based on the top 8 high scoring elements in a routine (excluding Vault). The B Score (or E Score), is the score for execution, and is given for how well the skills are performed.