A perfect score the scoreboard could not show
At the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, the fourteen-year-old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comăneci performed a ROUTINE on the uneven BARS that earned the first perfect score of ten in Olympic history. The scoreboard had been built to show scores only up to 9.99, because nobody had expected a ten, so it displayed 1.00. The crowd was confused for a moment, then erupted. She scored six more tens at those Games.
The perfect ten no longer exists. In 2006 gymnastics changed to a system with two parts: one score for how difficult a routine is, with no upper limit, and one for how well it is done.
The leotard is named after a trapeze artist
The one-piece LEOTARD takes its name from Jules Léotard, a French acrobat who performed the first flying trapeze act in Paris in 1859, swinging between bars high above the audience. He wore a close-fitting knitted garment so it would not catch or flap. The word stuck to that kind of costume.
Gymnasts rub CHALK on their hands before using the BARS, RINGS or POMMEL horse. It is magnesium carbonate, the same powder climbers and weightlifters use, and it soaks up sweat so the hands do not slip. The pommel horse is thought to come from exercises once used to train soldiers to mount horses quickly.
Why tucking makes you spin faster
A gymnast spinning in the air can speed up or slow down without touching anything. In a TUCK, the knees are pulled tight to the chest, and the body spins much faster, just as a figure skater spins faster by pulling in their arms. In a PIKE, with the legs straight and the body folded at the hips, the spin is slower, and in a straight, stretched position it is slowest of all. Our forces and motion page explains the physics.
That is how a SOMERSAULT with a TWIST is controlled: the gymnast changes shape in the air to go faster, then opens out to slow down before landing the DISMOUNT.
Beam, floor and the rest of the grid
The BEAM is only ten centimetres wide and more than a metre off the ground, and gymnasts perform leaps, turns and a BACKFLIP on it while keeping their BALANCE. The FLOOR routine is performed to music on a sprung square, twelve metres across, mixing TUMBLE passes with dance. On the VAULT, gymnasts sprint, bounce off a springboard and push off the table with their hands. The table replaced the old vaulting horse in 2001, because its wider, padded top gave the hands a safer place to land.
Gymnastics starts with simpler skills: the CARTWHEEL, the HANDSTAND, the SPLITS and the AERIAL, a cartwheel with no hands. Gymnasts have to be strong and FLEXIBLE at once.
Gymnastics was one of the sports at the first modern Olympics, in Athens in 1896, but only for men. Women first competed in a team event in 1928, and individual women's events on the apparatus arrived in 1952. The word gymnasium comes from the ancient Greek for a place where athletes trained, and it still means a school in parts of Europe.