In 1928, women finally competed in gymnastics at the Olympic Games. Previously, they had been allowed to perform exhibitions, but they weren’t part of the competitive program.
The rules for the women’s competition at the 1928 Olympic Games were vague at best. After reading this post, you’ll probably have more questions than answers.
So, here are the rules…
Over the years, there have been many versions of the Olympic Games. One version was the International Workers’ Olympiads, which positioned itself in opposition to the “bourgeois” Olympics.
(For a list of Olympics that happened before the 1896 Olympics in Athens, check out this post.)
As I stated in my previous post, the International Workers’ Olympiads gave Swiss women the opportunity to compete internationally at a time when the FIG didn’t allow women to compete. (At the Olympic level, women first competed in gymnastics at the 1928 Olympics.)
So, let’s take a look at what happened at the First International Workers’ Olympiads in 1925.
In recent posts, we’ve talked a lot about the Swiss men, but we haven’t said much about the Swiss women. Even though Switzerland hosted the 1950 World Championships, the federation did not send any women. As the writer in Gazette de Lausanne noted:
The reason is that the leaders of our federation do not want to put our ladies in competition, considering that the latter is not reserved for representatives of the weaker sex. Are they wrong, are they right?
Gazette de Lausanne, July 18, 1950
La cause en est que les dirigeants de notre fédération ne veulent pas’ mettre nos dames en compétition, estimant que cette dernière n’est pas réservée aux représentantes du sexe faible. Ont-ils tort, ont-ils raison?
Intrigued, I looked into when and how the Swiss women were finally allowed to compete in gymnastics internationally. It turns out that the story is more complicated than it’s normally presented.
For starters, women’s artistic gymnasts from Switzerland had competed internationally before their supposed debut at the World Championships in 1966.
In fact, they had competed at an Olympics—just not the Olympics that you’re probably thinking of.
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 competitors 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.
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.