Gymnastics is among the oldest Olympic sports, and was practised widely throughout the ancient world. It was one of the few sports reintroduced when the Games were revived in 1896.
GYMNASTICS is among the oldest Olympic sports, and was practised widely throughout the ancient world. It was one of the few sports reintroduced when the Games were revived in 1896.
The Romanian Nadia Comaneci was the first gymnast judged to have achieved perfection.
The Greeks were passionate about exercise and each city had at least one area set aside for it.
Men regularly competed in the nude. A gymnasion was a place to exercise the body and the mind – it doubled as a meeting point for those wishing to discuss philosophy and art.
The abolition of the Olympics and other sporting festivals in 393AD virtually ended gymnastics for 1,400 years, until two competing forms were devised.
They eventually combined to give us the sport we know to-day.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, gymnastics flourished in Germany mainly due to the PE teacher Friedrich Ludwig Jahn.
Considered the “father of modern gymnastics”, he devised various apparatus – the side bar, the horizontal bar, the parallel bars and the balance beam – still in use today.
Jahn opened a series of gymnastics schools, the first in Berlin in 1811. Soon clubs formed across Europe.
In Sweden, Pehr Henrik Ling developed a more rhythmic regime promoting better health and poise without apparatus. The Olympic floor exercises are a direct result.
A dance performed with a hoop, ball or ribbon was introduced as an Olympic sport at Los Angeles in 1984.
Men’s gymnastics, the German way, was on the schedule of the first modern Olympics in 1896.
Unsurprisingly Germany won five of the eight medals.
Rope climbing was an Olympic discipline in the first Games and remained so until 1932.
Competitive gymnastics for women began only in 1936 at Berlin, when Germany won the team event.
An individual contest was introduced at Helsinki in 1952.
Twenty years later, at the Munich Olympics, gymnastics entered its most important and popular era.
Olga Korbut, of the Soviet Union, won two golds in the balance beam and the floor exercise.
She was the first gymnast to complete a backward somersault on the balance beam.
But the performances of Nadia Comaneci at Montreal in 1976 were undoubtedly the most famous and enduring spectacle seen in a gymnastic arena.
The 14-year-old Romanian achieved a perfect 10.0 – an unprecedented score which proved too much for the electronic scoreboard.
Her first of seven perfect 10s came on the asymmetric bars during the team competition in which she won silver.
But Comaneci went on to take three individual golds in the all-round competition, the uneven bars and the balance beam.
She became a global superstar, making the cover of America’s prestigious Time magazine.
Britain had always failed to make any impact at the highest level in gymnastics until Beth Tweddle became our first ever world champion, on the uneven bars in 2006.
