Famous Male Olympic Gymnasts - 1896 - 1996 - by Anne Shier (a.k.a. "Annie")

(From the book “The Encyclopedia of The Summer Olympics”, by David Fischer, 1963)

Gymnastics has been an Olympic event for men since the modern Olympic Games began in 1896.  Early men’s events included rope climbing and club swinging, which were discontinued after the 1932 games.  Before World War II, Europeans dominated the competition.  Finland, Italy and Switzerland each won team medals four times. 

The former Soviet Union entered Olympic competition in 1952.  That, and the rise of Japan as a gymnastics powerhouse, dramatically changed gymnastics competitions.  In the dozen or so Olympiads since then, Japan and the Soviet-bloc countries have dominated men’s Olympic gymnastics.  Japan won five straight team gold medals from 1960 to 1976.  The Soviet Union (and later the Unified Team) won team gold medals in 1952, 1956, 1980, 1988, 1992, and 1996.  The United States won the team gold in 1904 and 1984 (the year the Soviet Union boycotted the games).

The men’s individual all-around competition has been part of every Olympiad since 1900.  Italy’s Alberto Braglia was the first all-around champion to win at back-to-back Olympics, in 1908 and 1912.  Soviet gymnasts swept the medals in the all-around competition at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Korea.  In 1992, Vitaly Scherbo of Belarus became the all-around champion and, two days later, won four straight apparatus finals in addition to the team title to become the first gymnast in history to earn six gold medals at a single Olympiad.  Scherbo added four bronze medals in 1996.

American gymnasts swept the medals in the parallel bars in 1904.  The gold medalist, George Eyser, who had a wooden left leg, also won a gold medal in the vault and the parallel bars, silver medals in the pommel horse and combined competition, and a bronze in the horizontal bar.  It took 80 years for the next American to capture the gold medal in the parallel bars.  Bart Conner won the event in 1984.  In the 1996 games in Atlanta, U.S.A., Jair Lynch took the silver medal and became the first African-American to win a gymnastics medal.

The pommel horse event was suspended from 1908 to 1920.  Heike Savolainen of Finland captured the bronze medal in 1928, and again 20 years later, in 1948.  Savolainen, who set a record by competing in five Olympiads, won two gold, one silver, and six bronze medals during his career.  He was 44 years old when he received his last medal as a member of the third-place Finnish team at the Helsinki Olympics.

American gymnast Dallas Bixler won the gold for the horizontal bar event at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, U.S.A.  Finnish teammates Heike Savolainen and Einari Terasvirta tied for second.  While the judges discussed a method deciding which athlete should win the silver medal, the two Finns talked it over and agreed that Savolainen should have the silver and Terasvirta the bronze.  The judges accepted their decision.

In 1964, Haruhiro Yamashita of Japan won the gold medal for vault with a handspring in a pike position.  The new maneuver became known as the Yamashita.  In 1972, East Germany’s Klaus Koste won the title with a Yamashita vault with a forward somersault, claiming the first gold medal for his country in men’s gymnastics.

Addendum:  Although men’s Olympic gymnastics has been around much longer than women’s Olympic gymnastics, the moves do not seem to have changed nearly as much as in women’s gymnastics.  The main differences between men’s and women’s Olympic gymnastics are the events:  for men, these events are horizontal bar, parallel bars, pommel horse, vault, rings and floor exercise.  Of these events, only the vault and floor exercise (tumbling) are similar between men’s and women’s events.  (Women do uneven bars and balance beam unlike the men.)  Every event for men has its own unique requirements for performance.  Gymnastics, in general, provides the excitement of acrobatics – vaulting, tumbling, jumping and twisting – with the grace and precision of dance movements (or connections).  And, judges look for form, balance, and artistic expression in all gymnastic performances and assign a score accordingly.

copyright 2014, Anne Shier.  All rights reserved.