Gymnastics

   

GYMNASTICS

Gymnastics events have been contested at every Summer Olympic Games since the birth of the modern Olympic movement at the 1896 Summer Olympic in Athens. For 32 years, only men were allowed to compete. Beginning at the 1928 Summer Olympic in Amsterdem, women were allowed to compete in artistic gymnastics events as well. Rhythmic gymnastics events were introduced at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, and Trampolining events were added at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney.

Gymnastic icon in the Olympic Games

Events

There are three separate disciplines at the Olympic Games in the sport of gymnastics. They are:

• Gymnastics - Artistic
• Gymnastics - Trampoline
• Gymnastics - Rhythmic

      

                                                             Gymnastic Artistic                             

Trivia

• The youngest ever Olympian was Greek gymnast Dimitrios Loundras.  who competed in the 1896 Athens Olympics when he was 10 years old (this does not count the young boys who competed as coxswain in the rowing events in 1896)
• Club Swinging was an early Olympic gymnastics event,as was tumbling and rope climbing. See more unusual Olympic gymnastics events.
• In 1904 in St Louis, one of the most remarkable athletes was the American gymnast George Eyser, who won six medals even though his left leg was made out of wood.
• In 1928, Luigina Giavotti became the youngest medalist of all time, helping the Italian gymnastics team pick up a silver at the age of 11 years and 302 days.
• During the London Olympics in 1948, one of nine members of Czechoslovakia women's gymnastics team, Eliska Misakova, became ill when she arrived in London. Diagnosed with polio, she died on the last day of the Olympics, the same day her remaining teammates won the competition.
• In 1964, Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina won six medals for the third time in a row. She is the gymnast with the most medals (18) and the most medals in individual events (14).
• No gymnast had ever achieved a perfect score of 10 until Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci scored seven of them at the 1976 Montreal games. In 1980, she returned to win two more gold medals.
• In 1980, Soviet athlete Aleksandr Dityatin won a record eight medals in gymnastics.
• In 1984, 16-year-old Mary Lou Retton earned her place on Wheaties boxes by winning four gymnastics medals - including a gold in all-around gymnastics - just six weeks after undergoing knee surgery.
• In 1992, Gymnast Vitaly Scherbo of the Unified Team won six gold medals in gymnastics.
• In 1996, the US won gold in gymnastics, with the help of Kerri Strug, who nailed her second vault despite having a sprained ankle.
• In 2000, Russian gymnast Alexei Nemov won six medals, as he had done in Atlanta in 1996.
• Although both men and women compete in some form in all sports, rhythmic gymnastics is one of two (the other is synchronized swimming) sporting disciplines that are solely for women.
• Gymnast Svetlana Boginskaya competed at the Olympic Games for three different countries, Soviet Union (1988), Unified Team (1992) and Belarus (1996). She won two gold medals for the Soviet Union and one for the Unified, making her one of the few athletes to win gold medals for more than one country at the Olympics.

Russian gymnast, Alexei Nemov have won six medals