Gymnastics meant training naked long before Olympic bars
Gymnastics covers sports demanding balance, strength, flexibility, agility, and artistry. Its name comes from Greek gymnos through the verb gymnazo, to train naked, because athletes in Sparta and Athens exercised unclothed, and the sport’s international federation was founded in Liège in 1881.
After Rome conquered Greece in 146 BC, the exercises became more formal and were used to train men for war. Philostratus treated gymnastics as a form of wisdom alongside philosophy, poetry, and geometry. The modern movement began with Friedrich Ludwig Jahn in Berlin in 1811, whose followers devised the parallel bars, rings, horizontal bar, pommel horse, and vault horse, while the Spanish colonel Francisco Amorós brought educational gymnastics to France.
In the United States, the first gymnasium was Charles Beck’s, opened at Northampton’s Round Hill School in 1825; Charles Follen opened the first college and public gyms at Harvard and in Boston in 1826, and John Neal opened one in Portland, Maine, in 1827. Men’s gymnastics appeared at the first modern Olympics in 1896, once including rope climbing and team calisthenics, and women first competed at the Olympics in Amsterdam in 1928. Apparatus was standardized by 1954.
Men now compete on six apparatus, adding pommel horse, rings, parallel bars, and horizontal bar to floor and vault; women compete on vault, uneven bars, balance beam, and floor. Since 2006 scores combine an open-ended difficulty mark with an execution mark starting from 10, replacing the old perfect 10, though US women’s college gymnastics still uses the 10.0 scale.
The equipment is precise. The beam stands 125 cm high, 5 m long, and just 10.16 cm wide, and routines on it last up to 90 seconds. Vaulters sprint down a 25-metre runway, and in 2001 the old horse gave way to a wider, safer table. Floor routines use a sprung 12-by-12-metre square; women perform to music without words, while men’s passes total 60 to 70 seconds without music and must touch every corner.
Source: Gymnastics
