Published By: Rinks

History Of Artistic Gymnastics- How It All Started

From the first modern Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, in 1896, artistic gymnastics has been a staple of the Olympic program. Here in this article is the development of artistic gymnastics.

During both individual and team competitions, gymnasts in the art form known as "artistic gymnastics" execute brief routines on a variety of apparatus for 30 to 90 seconds. Displayed as groups of four for men & six for women, team events are grouped by gender. Gymnasts display incredible feats of strength, balance, flexibility, and elegance as they perform routines on the vault, bars, and beams and on the floor. Your preconceptions of the human body's capabilities will be challenged by the gymnastics on exhibit at these Olympic Games. There will be a variety of competitions over the course of a week, and the performances will showcase power and acrobatic prowess with spectacular flips and somersaults.

Artistic gymnastics: a historical perspective

German Friedrich Ludwig Jahn was an early 1800s pioneer who helped establish guidelines for group exercise; by the mid 1800s, many countries had established national gymnastics federations (Switzerland was the very first in 1832, followed by Germany, Belgium, Poland, Italy, and France); however, it wasn't until 1880, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain established its own concept of group gymnastics.

In 1881, Nicolas J. Cuperus penned the first chapters of the FIG's history, which emphasised recreational, educational, and universally accessible gymnastics. Although though Cuperus was from Antwerp, where the inaugural gymnastics World Championships were held in 1903, the FIG was so conservative at the time that the competition was restricted to males only. When women were first allowed to compete in the Olympics in 1934, it had been a full decade since the first women were invited towards the Olympic games in 1928.

As women were allowed to compete, artistic gymnastics became formalised, and the first gathering of both the International Technical Committee, that would eventually become the Technical Assembly in 1949, was held in 1932. In 1949, a 12-page Code of Points is drafted; today's equivalent is 164 pages long.

Gymnastics evolved from a floor exercise discipline to incorporate apparatuses like the pommel horse, horizontal bar, parallel bars, and rings. Artistic gymnastics as we know it now was formalised in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, with men competing on six equipment and women on four.

The vaulting table replaced the vaulting horse for the 2001 World Championships in Ghent, but other than that, the format has remained same since then.

Aerial gymnastics and the Olympic Games

At the 1936 Olympics, a new era in artistic gymnastics began. Gymnasts like German Alfred Schwarzmann and Swiss Eugen Mack shifted the spotlight away from muscular prowess and synchronised collective routines and onto the individual performer.

The Soviet Union shocked the world with its "scientific" method of gymnastics in the 1952 Winter Olympics in Helsinki, and athletes like Viktor Chukarin, Hrant Shahinyan, and Larisa Latynina were the catalysts for this change. Nadia Comaneci of Romania, Nellie Kim of South Korea, and Alexander Dityatin of Slovenia, all of whom wowed spectators throughout the world in the 1970s, are three more Olympians who have scored a perfect 10.