Category: World Championships

The women’s competition at the 1928 Olympic Games was solely a team competition. As was the women’s competition at the 1934 World Championships. As was the women’s competition at the 1936 Olympic Games.

At the 1938 World Championships, in addition to the team results, a women’s individual all-around champion was crowned for the first time at a major FIG competition. (Note: Previously, there had been individual champions at competitions like the Workers’ Olympics, which were unaffiliated with the FIG.)

Let’s take a look at what happened on June 30 and July 1.

At the 1934 World Championships in Budapest, women at the World Championships for the first time. 

Only five women’s teams participated, but remember that only four men’s teams participated at the first International Tournament, the competition that would become known as the World Championships. (In fact, 1934 was the year that the International Tournament was renamed, becoming known as the World Championships.)

The format for the women’s competition was quite different from modern competitions. There were javelin throws, partner acro exercises, and national dances.

Here’s what happened on June 1 and 2, 1934.

In 1950, women competed at their third World Championships, and guess what happened.

The vault judges botched the scoring so badly that they had to be replaced.

Who said that old gymnastics meets were boring?

Oh, and unlike the 1934 and 1938 World Championships, the women did not compete in track and field events in 1950. (The men did.)

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.

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.