1909 – Gymnastics History

1909: The Fight over Competition Formats at the FIG Congress

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.

Dr. Jindřich Vaníček, one of the major figures in gymnastics at the time.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

1909: French Algerian Gymnasts Dominate the World Championships

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.