While the men had a Code of Points in place for the 1950 World Championships, the women did not. But they did have a book of General Instructions. What follows are the highlights.
Author: Gymnastics History
In 1950, Hans Eugster scored a perfect 10 on the parallel bars at the World Championships. It was the first 10 under the very first men’s Code of Points (1949).
The competition wasn’t without its judging controversies that spilled over into the pages of the French and Swiss newspapers.
Do you wish that pommel horse weren’t a part of men’s artistic gymnastics? If Sweden had its way in 1950, the apparatus would be gone.
Do you wish that men would use floor music? Hungary and Poland wanted that to happen in 1950.
Do you wish that women still competed on flying rings? Well, you have several federations to blame for that.
Oh, and you have Hungary to thank for the size of today’s floor exercise.
Let’s dive into the details of the 1950 FIG Congress.
Even before the 1950 World Championships started, there was drama at the World Championships. Hungary was supposed to send a large delegation of gymnasts, but they didn’t. Instead, a small group of officials reportedly came and tried to bar Yugoslavia from competing.
Competition previews are a tried and true genre of gymnastics sports writing. They give you a snapshot of who are the favorites, how certain countries’ gymnasts are perceived, and what the supposed expectations of the judges are. Plus, they are fun to read after the competition and see how much the author got right and wrong.
Let’s take a look at the preview for the 1950 World Championships in Basel, Switzerland. It was written by Jean A. Latte and was printed in the French Moroccan newspaper La Vigie Marocaine on July 7, 1950.
Female gymnasts did not compete in the International Tournament or in the Belgian Federal Festival. But they did perform, and according to the newspaper reports, they were crowd favorites.
In this article, we’ll take a look at those newspaper reports, as well as some of the challenges facing women’s gymnastics in fin-de-siècle western European society.
Note: I’m going to refer to it as “women’s gymnastics” in this post, but we won’t be discussing the performances of adult women. Rather, the gymnasts were typically young girls.
I’ve covered the first Olympic Games in Athens. Now, it’s time to discuss the first World Championships, which were held in Antwerp.
First things first, the competition wasn’t called a world championship at the time. It was referred to as the International Gymnastics Tournament (“Tournoi International de Gymnastique” in French or “Internationale Turntornooi” in Dutch). The competition was held in conjunction with the Belgian Federal Festival, August 14-18, 1903.
Note: I’ll refer to an article written by Pierre Hentgès, Sr. in this post. If you don’t know who he is, he was a Luxembourgish gymnast who competed at the 1912 Olympics. He later became the President of the Men’s Technical Committee of the FIG in 1954.
What did the FIG discuss at its congress in 1896?
Here are the extant minutes from the meeting — as printed in Le Gymnaste, December 12, 1896.
Note: It wasn’t called the FIG at that point, nor was it called a Congress. What transpired was a meeting of the European Federations of Gymnastics (Fédérations européennes de gymnastique).
Nowadays, we see the Olympic Games as the pinnacle of sports, and we have romanticized the first modern Olympics in Athens.
But, to understand the gymnastics competition at the 1896 Olympic Games, we need to set aside those notions.
By and large, the gymnastics community didn’t see the first Olympic Games as a glorious revival of an ancient tradition. In fact, most of the European gymnastics federations turned down their invitations.
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1964: The Women’s Code of Points
The 1964 Code of Points was the second Code for women’s gymnastics. You can read the document in its entirety at the bottom of this post. Otherwise, here are a few notes…
