Gymnastics is an amateur sport administered worldwide by the Federation of International Gymnastics (FIG). Every country has its own headquarters but FIG looks after arrangements for the Olympics, World Championships, World Cup, and all other major championships. Representatives from Belgium, Holland, and France founded FIG in 1881. The first major International meeting was held at Antwerp in 1903, with the first World Championships being held in Hungary in 1934. Let’s put a deep look at gymnastics history.
Although gymnastics can be traced back to the ancient civilizations of Persia, China and India, and the to the 766 BC Olympic games in Greece, it was not until early in the last century that the sport, as we know it today, was formed. Modern gymnastics began with two entirely opposite schools of thinking. Friedrich Jahn, a Prussian military man and turnvator, favoured bodybuilding with exercises on apparatus. He taught on parallel bars and, in 1811, founded an open-air gymnastics center in Berlin. However, Pehr Henrik Ling, born in Sweden in 1776, saw gymnastics as a school fitness activity without apparatus. He strongly disapproved of Jahn's ideas about gymnastics. The two outlooks have caused much debate ever since and, even today; you may still arguments on the subjects. Athens, 1896, was the scene for the modern Olympics with gymnastics one of the nine sports represented. Seventy-five gymnasts from five countries attended. Only men were allowed to take part, working on five of the present-day apparatus together with a rope-climbing competition in place of floor exercises.
The rope-climb stayed until 1932. Women gymnasts first competed at the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. In those days gymnastics was only a team event. The Dutch were the first woman's gold medalists with Italy taking silver, Great Britain bronze, followed by Romania in fourth place. Individual, overall championships for women were first held at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. At this point gymnastics took a major leap forward. The Soviet Union took part for the first time and there were over 300 gymnasts competing from thirty countries.
Asia and Eastern Europe took over as world leaders from the West, led by Larissa Latynina of the Soviet Union who picked up nine Olympic Gold medal, five silvers and four bronzes. Yukio Endo of Japan and Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia were also among the world elite. Jahn and Ling rejuvenated the sport in the 1810s but in the 1970s two young gymnasts brought the sport to the world's attention through television. First came Olga Korbut, a legend for evermore.
The young Russian was never Olympic champion but she captured the imagination of the world with her elfin looks. When she had a disaster on the bars, rare thing for a Russian, the world wept with her as the camera captured her look of utter dejection. Then came Nadia Comaneci (Little Miss Prefect) of Romania. In the 1978 Olympics she became the first gymnast ever to be awarded the maximum possible score of ten. Gymnastics became popular overnight and thousands of new clubs sprang up around the world to cater to the huge demand from inspired youngsters.
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