Gymnastics is an elegant and artistic sport that requires a combination of strength, balance, agility, and muscular coordination, usually performed on specialized apparatus. Gymnasts perform sequences of movements that require flexibility, endurance, and kinesthetic awareness, such as somersaults, handstands, split jumps, aerials, and somersaults.
Gymnastics as we know it dates back to ancient Greece. The early Greeks practiced gymnastics to prepare for war. Activities like jumping, running, discus throwing, wrestling, and boxing helped build the muscles needed for hand-to-hand combat. Additional physical conditioning practices used by the ancient Greeks included methods of mounting and dismounting horses and a variety of circus performance skills.
Gymnastics became a central component of ancient Greek education and was compulsory for all students. Gymnasiums, buildings with open-air courts where training took place, became schools where gymnastics, rhetoric, music, and mathematics were taught. Around this time the ancient Olympic Games were born.
As the Roman Empire rose, Greek gymnastics became more or less military training. In 393 AD Emperor Theodosius completely abolished the Olympic Games. The games had become corrupted and gymnastics, along with other sports, declined. For centuries, gymnastics was almost forgotten.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, two pioneering physical educators, Johann Friedrich GutsMuth and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, created exercises for children and youth on severe apparatus they had designed. This innovation eventually led to what is considered modern gymnastics. As a result, Friedrich Jahn became known as the “father of gymnastics”. Jahn introduced the horizontal bar, parallel bars, side pommel horse, balance beam, ladder, and vault horse.
In the early 19th century, educators in the United States followed suit, adopting German and Swedish gymnastics training programs. At the beginning of the 20th century, the armed forces began to publish instruction manuals with all kinds of gymnastic exercises. According to the US Army Physical Exercise Manual, these important exercises provided adequate instruction for the bodies of active youth.
However, as time passed, military activity moved away from hand-to-hand combat and toward contemporary fighter planes and computer-controlled weapons. As a result of the development of modern warfare, gymnastics training as a connection between mind and body, so important to Greek, German and Swedish educational traditions, began to lose steam. Gymnastics once again took on the aura of being a competitive sport.
By the end of the 19th century, men’s gymnastics was popular enough to be included in the first modern Olympic Games held in 1896. However, the sport was a bit different from what we know as gymnastics today. Until the early 1950s, national and international competitions involved an ever-changing variety of exercises that the modern gymnast may find a bit strange, such as synchronized team floor calisthenics, rope climbing, high jump, running, and stair climbing. horizontal, just to name a few.
Women began participating in gymnastics events in the 1920s and the first women’s Olympic competition was held at the 1928 Games in Amsterdam, although the only event was synchronized calisthenics. Combined exercises for women were first performed in 1928, and the 1952 Olympics featured the first full regimen of events for women.
For the 1954 Olympics, the men’s and women’s apparatus and events were standardized in a modern format and scoring standards were implemented, including a 1-10 point system.
Men’s modern gymnastics events are scored individually and as a team, and currently include floor, horizontal bar, parallel bars, rings, pommel horse, vault and the all-around, which combines the scores from the other six events.
Women’s gymnastic events include balance beam, uneven parallel bars, medleys, floor exercises, vault, and rhythmic sports gymnastics.
Until 1972, men’s gymnastics emphasized power and strength, while women performed routines focused on grace of movement. That year, however, a 17-year-old Soviet gymnast named Olga Korbut wowed television audiences with her innovative and explosive routines.
Nadia Comaneci received the first perfect score, at the 1976 Olympic Games held in Montreal, Canada. She was trained by the famous Romanian Bela Karolyi. Comaneci scored four of her perfect tens on the uneven bars, two on the balance beam and one on the floor exercise. Nadia will always be remembered as “a fourteen-year-old girl with a ponytail” who showed the world that perfection could be achieved.
Mary Lou Retton became America’s sweetheart with her two perfect scores and gold medal in the All-Around competition in front of the home crowd at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
These days gymnastics is a household name and many children take part in gymnastics at one point or another as they grow older. Olga Korbut, Nadia Comaneci, and Mary Lou Retton, along with all those gymnasts since, have helped popularize women’s competitive gymnastics, making it one of the most watched Olympic events. Both men’s and women’s gymnastics now attract considerable international interest, and excellent gymnasts can be found on every continent.