Male gymnasts have always competed on floor, pommel horse, rings, vault, parallel bars, and high bar, right?
Wrong.
Male gymnasts had quite the journey to today’s competitive format. Here’s a look at events in which the men competed in the early years of the Olympic Games and World Championships.
During the 1913 International Tournament, the “Slavs vs. everyone else” mentality became further entrenched. The Slovenians and the Czechs felt disadvantaged because they were outnumbered on the judging panels. Plus, the text of the compulsory routine on rings changed, and the two Slavic teams were not notified of the change. Nevertheless, the Czech team won its third team title, defeating the French once again.
It’s unclear how diligent the judges were. Reportedly, one judge didn’t even watch some of the routines.
1913 also marks the (temporary) simplification of the scoring system. In Paris, all scores were out of a 10.0. Previously, the apparatus events were out of a 12.0 at the International Tournament, with 1 point for the mount, another point for the dismount, and 10 points for the routine.
Similarly, the track and field events were also out of 10 points in 1913. Previously, the scoring system had been ever-changing at the International Tournament: 10 points in 1903, 20 points in 1905 and 1907, 15 points in 1909 and 1911.
(Don’t worry, the scoring system would become complicated once again.)
The 1911 International Tournament was an unfortunate series of events.
Several gymnasts were injured during the competition, and despite their injuries, they continued to compete with broken limbs and bandaged heads.
Rain pushed the apparatus portion of the competition indoors. When it came time for the athletics portion in the afternoon, Cupérus, the FIG President, wanted the athletes to compete in inclement weather rather than end the competition or finish it the next day.
Because of the rain delay, several gymnasts had to sprint 100 m in near darkness.
One more important note: Until the 1948 Olympic Games, teams could bring their own apparatus to competitions. That tradition started in 1911 with the Czech Sokols.
During the women’s all-around at the Sydney Olympics, the vault was set 5 cm too low. Multiple gymnasts vaulted on a horse set at 120 cm when it should have been set at 125 cm. As a result, several gymnasts fell, including the favorite for the all-around title, Svetlana Khorkina.
During the third rotation’s warmup, Allana Slater insisted that something was wrong, and eventually, the vault was raised to the correct height (125 cm). After the competition, Kym Dowdell, the competition manager, issued a statement:
“Unfortunately, equipment personnel failed to set the vault at the appropriate height.”
Qtd in. International Gymnast, November 2000
But how? How do equipment personnel fail to set the vault correctly?
That’s the question that the gymnastics community has been asking for over two decades.
Well, I have a hypothesis. It has to do with the apparatus norms that were printed in 2000.
Before Nadia Comăneci’s and Nellie Kim’s perfect 10s at the 1976 Olympic Games, there was a long line of gymnasts who obtained perfect scores at the Olympic Games, the World Championships, or the European Championships. (Originally, the World Championships were called the International Tournament.)
Some of them even managed perfect totals, meaning that they received the maximum score for their compulsory and optional routines combined.
So, here’s a chronological list of the gymnasts who were “perfect” before Comăneci and Kim.
There are pivotal moments in the history of gymnastics — those moments when the sport could have gone in a very different direction.
One of those inflection points was the 1909 FIG Congress. Not much was decided in 1909 because the attendees had wildly divergent views on competition formats.
One proposal called for blind compulsories. In other words, the gymnasts would attend a competition, where they would be shown the compulsories that they had to compete. They wouldn’t know beforehand what to practice.
Can you imagine? The history of gymnastics would look very different if that proposal had been accepted.
That said, not every idea was as wild as blind compulsories. For instance, there was a desire to form a permanent technical committee, which eventually happened decades later.
French gymnasts had been the victors at the first International Tournaments in 1903 and 1905, but the Czech Sokols ended that streak in 1907 when they hosted the International Tournament in Prague.
A rivalry was forming between the two top teams in Europe: the Czech Sokols and the French. However, the Czech media subtly questioned how European the rivalry was, given that France’s best gymnasts were from Algeria. (The International Tournament was a competition run by the Bureau of European Gymnastics Federations.)
Regardless, the French Algerian gymnasts stole the show in Luxembourg in 1909. In fact, one of them registered two perfect event totals, scoring the maximum number of points for both the compulsory and optional routines on not just one but two events.
Note: French Algerian gymnasts had competed in previous International Tournaments. However, the gymnasts’ place of origin hadn’t been a major topic in the media coverage prior to 1909. The topics of empire and Eurocentrism are far too thorny to broach in a competition recap.
Which gymnastics federations should be allowed to join the Bureau of European Gymnastics Associations (now the FIG)?
How are the International Tournaments different from the Olympic Games? Should there even be an International Tournament? They are costly to run, and President Cupérus was originally opposed to the idea of gymnastics competitions.
These are some of the questions that the Bureau of European Gymnastics Associations had to answer during the 1907 Congress.
Women didn’t compete at the International Tournament in 1907. (They wouldn’t compete at the World Championships until 1934.) But female gymnasts were part of the Fifth Sokol Rally in 1907.
Let’s take a look at their participation.
In the official proceedings of the Sokol Rally, the Czechs wrote:
All the professional journals of Europe have written of the fitness of the Czechs, of the understanding in the nation, and today it is certain that we stand first in their eyes and that we have set the direction and pattern for gymnastic endeavors in Europe.
V slet všesokolský 1907: pamětní list vydaný péči
Všecky odborné časopisy evropské psaly o tělocvičné zdatnosti Čechů, o porozumění v národu a dnes je jisto, že v jejich očích stojíme na prvním místě a že jsme udali směr i vzor tělocvičným snahám v Evropě.
But that statement wasn’t exactly true. The German-language press had quite a few negative things to write about the Czech Sokols after the 1907 slet.
