Artistic Gymnastics

Women's events Floor exercise Balance beam Uneven bars

High bar Men's events: Parallel bars Still rings Floor exercise

In Olympic or World Championships competition, the meet is divided into several sessions which occur on different days: team qualifying, team finals, all-around finals and event finals. During the team qualifying round, gymnasts compete with their national squad. The scores from this session are not used to award medals, but are used to determine which teams advance to the team finals and which individual gymnasts advance to the all-around and event finals. In the team finals, gymnasts compete with their national squad on all four/six apparatus. The scores from the session are used to determine the medalists of the team competition. In the all-around finals, the gymnasts are individual competitors and perform on all four/six apparatus. Their scores are added together and the gymnasts with the three highest totals are awarded all-around medals. Only two gymnasts from each country may advance to the all-around finals. In the event finals, the top eight gymnasts on each event compete for medals.

History Gymnastics as a system of harmonious sports training originated in Ancient Greece more than 2,000 years ago. It included many disciplines, which would later become separate sports: swimming, race, wrestling, boxing, riding, and was also used for military training. In its present form gymnastics evolved in Germany and Czechoslovakia in the beginning of the 19th century, and the term "artistic gymnastics" was introduced at the same time to distinguish free styles from the ones used by the military. A German educator Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, who was known as the father of gymnastics, invented several apparatus. Gymnastics was included into the program of the 1896 Summer Olympics, but women were allowed to participate in the Olympics only since 1928. World Championships, held since 1903 also remained for men only until 1934. Since that time two branches of artistic gymnastics have been developing—WAG and MAG—which, unlike men's and women's branches of many other sports, are much different in apparatus used at the major competitions, in techniques and concerns.

Equipment and uniforms -Chalk -Grips -Mats -Uniform -Braces -Apparatus -Leotards

THE END Micaela Adlerstein 4KC