This date in 1778 was the birthdate of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a German patriot, who is known as the father of gymnastics. 10 things you didn’t know about gymnastics.
The word gymnastics is derived from Ancient Greek, from words meaning “to exercise naked”, which the Ancient Greeks actually did.
It was more than just a sport to all these naked Ancient Greeks. To them, it was training for war, including methods for mounting and dismounting their Horses. At that time, athletics, pole vault, shot put, wrestling and boxing were included under the umbrella of gymnastics.
The aforementioned Friedrich Ludwig Jahn founded a gymnastics club in a field known as the Hasenheide (Rabbit field) on the outskirts of Berlin. He called it the Turnplatz or outdoor playground, and it was equipped with apparatus such as a pommel horse, balance beams, horizontal bars, climbing ropes, and climbing poles, and a tall tower as a test of courage. In 1816, he and his assistant Ernst Eiselen wrote a book based on the exercises developed at the Turnplatz, called Die Deutsche Turnkunst (The German Gymnastic Art).
In due course, in 1860, the first German gymnastic festival (Turnfest) was held in Coburg, which attracted gymnasts from far and wide, and marked the start of international competition.
Gymnastics became a modern Olympic sport in 1896, but at that point, it was only for men. Women had to wait until 1928 before they were allowed to complete in Olympic gymnastics. The first female event was combined group exercise; the Netherlands won.
Today, men’s events in Olympic gymnastics are floor exercise, pommel horse, rings, vault, parallel bars and horizontal bar. Women’s events are floor exercise, vault, uneven bars and balance beam.
Points depend not only on performing a routine perfectly, but points can be scored even before the gymnast walks out into the arena, as a portion of the points are awarded for the difficulty of their proposed routine.
Champion gymnasts tend to be short. The average female gymnast is about 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall, about 4 inches (10 cm) less than the average American woman. Thanks to the laws of physics, shorter people have advantages, including a better power-to-weight ratio. There have been controversies about Olympic gymnasts having their growth and development stunted so they keep those advantages for longer and/or that participating in the sport stunts a person’s growth. However, it has been observed that the parents of gymnasts also tend to be shorter than average.
The first gymnast ever to achieve a perfect score in Olympic competition was Nadia Comaneci of Romania in 1976.
The governing body of the sport is World Gymnastics, formerly the International Gymnastics Federation, founded on 23 July 1881 in Liège, Belgium. It is the oldest existing international sports organisation, with headquarters is in Lausanne, Switzerland.
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