Olmps

High bar (men only)

Also known as the horizontal bar, this piece of apparatus

consists of a steel bar 2..4cm thick and 2..4m long fixed 2..75m above the ground.. Competitors swing from it continuously, except when performing releases (aerial manoeuvres which involve temporarily letting go of the bar).. Extra variation is provided by one-handed rotations, changes of grip, changing the direction of rotation and switching the lead part of the body from front to back.. Dismounts tend to be even more dramatic that those from the rings as the gymnasts are able to generate more momentum by means of giants (powerful extended body rotations)..Triple twisting somersaults are considered almost routine at Olympic level..

Parallel bars (men only)

The parallel bars are wooden, 3.5m long, 1.95m high

and between 42 and 52cm apart (the distance can be adjusted

with the delightful but troubling notion of perfection.. Performances on each piece of apparatus are currently marked by two panels of judges..The first, which has two members, calculates the difficulty of the routine on the basis of a standard list of values for its elements..The difficulty score is open-ended, which has led some critics to claim that the results of a competition can effectively be decided before it has started (though, of course, the harder the routine, the greater the risk of losing points in its execution)..

The second judging panel, which has six members, marks the ex- ecution on a scale of 1 to 10..The highest and lowest scores are discarded and the remaining four scores are averaged..This figure is then added to the difficulty score to give a final mark for the performance..Any total of 16 or more is exceptional – even the phenomenal Xiao Qin scored only 15..875 in winning gold at Beijing

Rhythmic Gymnastics

Rhythmic gymnastics takes place on a mat with the

same dimensions and qualities as the floor exercise..Although practised by men in some countries, notably Japan, it is a women-only discipline at the Olympics..All routines are accompanied by music, which must be free of vocals and alarming sound effects. . Indi- vidual routines must be between 75 and 90 seconds in duration.. The parameters for team routines are 60 seconds longer. .The key to success is keeping the equipment continually in motion, handling it with as much variety as possible, and producing routines that feel like unified performances.. Demonstrations of bodily flexibility are also rewarded by the judges..

For rhythmic gymnastics there are separate qualifying rounds for the team and individual competitions. . No more than two gymnasts from the same nation can qualify for the individual final, in which each gymnast performs with all four accessories: the ribbon, hoop, ball and clubs..The team final consists of two rounds: in the first, five of the six members of the team perform with the same piece of equipment (the ball at London 2012); in the second, two pieces of equipment are used simultaneously, three team

members using one, two the other (hoops and ribbons respectively at London 2012)..

Hoop

The hoops used in rhythmic gymnastics must be semi-

rigid and 80–90cm in diameter.. Competitors throw them, catch them, rotate them around their hands and bodies, swing them, jump through them and roll them along the ground..Any flutter while the hoop is travelling through the air is penalised..

Ball

Surprisingly ‘street’, the ball exercise combines ele-

ments of basketball, freestyle soccer and seal-like joie de vivre. . Gymnasts perform with a single ball 18–20cm in diameter..They are not allowed to grip the sphere but must let it rest on their hands, unless they are bouncing, throwing or rolling it, or balancing it on some other part of their anatomy..The ball is generally considered the most elegant of the rhythmic gymnastic disciplines..

Clubs

This is drum majoretting taken to another dimension.

Each gymnast performs with two wooden or synthetic clubs which are shaped like skinny bowling pins, with graspable ‘knobs’ on their heads.. Successful performance requires many of the same skills as juggling, including high levels of hand and eye co-ordination and ambidexterity.. In addition to throwing and catching the clubs,competitors balance them on their hands and swing them in a variety of visually appealing ways, while performing leaps and other acrobatic moves.. Some rhythmic gymnasts grip them between their toes..

Ribbon

The ribbon is a 7cm strip of satin or similar material

attached at one end to a 50–60cm stick..Visually this is perhaps the most appealing of the rhythmic disciplines, with competitors creating ever-shifting calligraphic shapes in the air.. Large, free-flowing movements are rewarded and the gymnasts employ a wide range of throws and catches..

Scoring

Rhythmic displays are given marks out of 10 in three

categories: execution, in which deductions are made for mistakes such as losing control of the equipment; artistic expression; and difficulty..There are four judges for each category, whose marks are averaged..

Trampoline

Olympic trampolines are 5.05m long, 2.91m wide and

1..155m high..The bouncy bed is around 6mm thick and is made from nylon or string-based material..The centre of the bed – the springiest part – is marked with a cross to help competitors to position themselves..The closer they land to it the better, from both a safety and a technical perspective..

An Olympic routine consists of ten elements or bounces, although competitors are allowed to make preliminary bounces to achieve suitable heights, plus one manoeuvre-free bounce at the end to control their height and prepare to ‘stick’ their landings.. Each element must be different – if one is repeated, the second occurrence receives a difficulty score of zero..

While performing their elements, trampolinists must keep their legs together with the toes pointed..They should keep their bodies in one of three positions: straight, in which the body and limbs are held as the adjective suggests, pike, in which the straightened legs are grasped near the ankles, and tuck, in which the bent knees are clasped to the chest..

Competitors must start and end their routines on their feet. . In theory they are allowed to land on their seats, fronts or backs at other stages, but this rarely happens in top-class competition. . The final landing should be ‘stuck’, i..e.. ended abruptly and in a controlled manner with both feet on the bed..The gymnast must remain standing still for approximately three seconds..

Both male and female competitions start with two-routine qualification rounds..The best eight progress to the finals, where they perform another routine which determines their final placing..As

with other gymnastic disciplines, no more than two finalists may come from any nation..

Scoring

There are two elements to a contestant’s score. The

difficulty score is calculated by adding up the set tariffs of all the moves within a routine: manoeuvres like the quadriffus, a quadruple somersault with half a twist or more, are very valuable.. Top male performers typically perform routines with difficulty values of around 16..5; the equivalent figure for women is 14..5.. Five judges score each routine for execution, with a maximum of 10 points..The verdicts of the most and least generous judges are discarded; the remaining three are added together and this figure is added to the difficulty mark to give an overall score..

The more controlled a performance the higher it will be marked.. Both feet should touch the bed simultaneously every time a gymnast lands, and they should land close to the cross..

Gymnastics Goes to the Olympics

Gymnastics, in one form or another, has featured at

every modern Olympics, but it took some time for the authorities to establish its parameters..There were eight gymnastic events at the first modern Games in Athens, all of them for men: rope climbing,

team horizontal bar and parallel bars competitions, plus all

the disciplines of today’s male artistic gymnastics except the floor exercise.. German gymnasts carried off five of the eight gold medals but there were home victories in the rings and rope climbing..

There was just one event at Paris 1900, a sixteen-exercise allround competition.. French gymnasts occupied the first eighteen places. .The odds were stacked in their favour, as 108 of the 135 entrants were from the home nation, but it was an impressive performance nonetheless..The ratio of Americans to other competitors was even higher in St Louis but one title did go to another nation: Switzerland’s solitary gymnast Adolf Spinnler won the triathlon, which consisted of routines on the high and parallel bars plus the horse..

London 1908 hosted two events: an all-round individual competition, won by Alberto Braglia of Italy, and a group team event, won by Sweden.. Braglia won the individual all-round title again in Stockholm, adding another gold to his collection in the apparatus-based team contest, while Sweden (predictably) won the Swedish System team event..They did it again at Antwerp in 1920..

The list of events was expanded to nine for Paris 1924, with individual apparatus titles back on the agenda.. Switzerland, It- aly and Yugoslavia each notched up two wins.. Swiss gymnasts won five gold medals at Amsterdam 1928, where women’s synchronised calisthenics joined the party..This last event – the first Olympic gymnastics competition for women – was won by the Dutch, four of whose team were Jewish; three were to perish in the Nazi gas chambers..

There were no women’s events at LA 1932 but at Berlin 1936 they competed individually for the first time in the Olympics, albeit in the context of a team competition. . German gymnasts won six of the nine gold medals on offer..The Finns did the same at London 1948, in a tournament that was marked by weird scoring

– one judge awarded 13..1 points out of 10 for a performance in the women’s team competition. .This event, which included the rings for the one and only time, was won by Czechoslovakia, whose victory was made particularly poignant by the death from polio of intended team member Eliska Misáková on the first day of the competition..

Individual women’s events (all-round and apparatus) made their debut at Helsinki 1952, where the Soviets competed in the Olympics for the first time..They made an immediate impression, winning nine gold medals, including four for thirty-year-old Viktor Chukarin..The USSR’s policy of hot-housing talented young children would ensure that this was no flash in the pan..The practice later spread to other Eastern Bloc nations (notably Roma- nia and East Germany), where generous state sponsorship went hand-in-hand – it is widely believed – with chemical assistance.. Puberty-arresting drugs, among other substances, are thought to have been commonly administered to young female gymnasts during the 1970s and 1980s..

At Melbourne 1956,

the star of the show was

Agnes Keleti of Hun-

gary, who won four gold medals at the age of 35

– she remains the oldest female Olympic gymnastics champion by quite a margin. . She was pipped to the all-round title by

Larysa Latynina of the

USSR.. Viktor Chukarin showed age wasn’t a barrier in the men’s division, either. .The great Soviet, now 34, added two golds to his collection, including a second successive men’s all-round title..

In 1960, Japan won the first of five successive men’s team titles, while Larysa Latynina took the women’s all-round gold again.. She claimed two more medals at Tokyo 1964, taking her

total Olympic haul to eighteen, the most won by any competitor in any Olympic sport.. But she lost her all-round crown to the rising star of the women’s sport,Vera Čáslavská of Czechoslovakia..

Čáslavská did it again four years later in Mexico City, where she was a huge hit with spectators, partly because of the prominent part she had played in the Prague Spring that year, partly because she used the Mexican Hat Dance as the accompaniment for her floor routine.. Čáslavská won four golds and two silvers at the 1968 Games, joining Latynina as the only female gymnast to have won the all-round title at two Olympics.. She also managed to squeeze

in a wedding to Czech 1500m champion Josef Odlozil.. But things turned sour for her thereafter.. Časlavaská’s conduct at the Games – she had turned her back during the playing of the Soviet anthem at a medal ceremony – led the Czech authorities to banish her from gymnastics..Then in 1992,a son she and Odlozil had produced during their marriage murdered his father in a bar room brawl..

If Čáslavská had raised the profile of women’s gymnastics, Olga Korbut sent it into orbit at Munich 1972..The coquettish seventeen-year-old Belarusian won golds in the team competition, floor and beam, and performed the first ever back flip on the uneven bars, but what secured her popularity was her bursting into tears after falling twice on the uneven bars during the allround competition.. Many purists, however, preferred the elegance of her compatriot Ludmilla Tourischeva, who won the allround title..

In 1976, at Montreal, Romania’s Nadia Comaneci became the first gymnast to score a perfect 10 in the Olympics – she went on to score six more in the course of securing three golds, a silver and a bronze.. Her great Soviet rival, Nellie Kim, also achieved two perfect scores, and took three golds and a silver..

But it was the exploits of Japan’s Shun Fujimoto in the men’s team competition that were the most remarkable.. During the last tumbling pass of his floor exercise routine, he fractured his kneecap..As the Japanese were going for their fifth successive victory in the face of stern competition from the heavily fancied Soviet team, he decided not to tell the team medics.. He proceeded to score 9..5 on the pommel horse and a life-time best of 9..7 on the rings, albeit at terrible cost – when he landed, after a twisting somersault dismount from a height of eight feet, he dislocated the broken knee-cap.. His efforts proved enough to secure victory for his team; when asked if he would do it all again, Fujimoto tersely replied ‘No.’

Fujimoto wasn’t the only Japanese hero in Montreal. . Sawao Kato’s victories in the team competition and parallel bars brought him his 7th and 8th Olympic golds, establishing a record that still stands..

Nadia and the Perfect tens

Nadia Comaneci had been awarded perfect scores in competitions preceding the Montreal Games, but it was nonetheless one of sport’s transcendent moments when, on 18th July, 1976, the scoreboard finally registered 10 at the Olympics – or 1.00 as it actually read, the

designers not having considered the possibility of perfection.

THE SCOREBOARD BLOWS A FUSE AS NADIA COMANECI SCORES TEN, MOntreal 1976

Comaneci’s literally faultless performance occurred during the uneven bars segment of the women’s all-round competition. Unusually self-possessed for a fourteen-year-old, she couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.‘I’ve had nineteen tens in my career,’ she revealed at a press conference. ‘It’s nothing new.’ Comaneci ended the Games with seven perfect scores, Nellie Kim of the USSR with two. The pony-tailed Romanian had already wowed the gymnastic world at the 1975 European Championships, winning every event except the floor exercise.

Being the first Olympic gymnast to achieve perfection multiplied the pressure on her. At fifteen, after the Romanian sports establishment had forced her stop training under Béla Károlyi, her coach and mentor,