Female gymnasts are acrobats, dancers and inventors. As the sport of women's gymnastics has evolved through history, gymnasts have pushed the envelope, inventing new skills their predecessors could only envision in their dreams. While women can compete in many forms of gymnastics, such as rhythmic or acrobatic, the term "women's gymnastics" generally refers to the most popular form: artistic gymnastics.
Apparatuses
In modern artistic gymnastics, women compete on the vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise, but women once competed in very different events. Before 1948, women competed in team drill exercises with and without hand apparatuses, such as the clubs, ribbons, balls and ropes that you now see only in rhythmic gymnastics. Women also competed on the even parallel bars, still rings and side horse -- exercises only the men do today.
Olympics
Women first competed in the Olympics in the team-combined exercise at the 1928 Amsterdam Games. The Netherlands took home the gold medal. The U.S. sent its first women's team to the Berlin Olympics in 1936. The full women's program debuted in 1952 with seven events, which changed to six events in 1960 and now includes only the four events. Originally, gymnasts had to be 14-years-old to compete, but in 1997, the Federation International de Gymnastique raised the minimum age to 16. In the modern games, the Olympics award medals for the team program, the all-around and the individual events: vault, uneven bars, balance beam and floor.
Scoring
Those perfect 10s that Nadia Comaneci famously scored at the 1976 Olympic Games are no longer possible because the scoring system drastically changed in 2006. Rather than scoring on a maximum start value of 10.0, two sets of judges score gymnasts on a difficulty score and an execution score. The difficulty score relates to the eight most difficult skills the gymnast performs. Each skill has its own score, as determined by the Code of Points. The execution score is just that -- how well the gymnast executes her routine, beginning with a 10.0 start value and taking deductions for errors. The number you see on the scoreboard is the difficulty score plus the execution score.
Skills
Gymnasts constantly add more difficulty to the skills on each apparatus. At the 1934 Olympics, performing the splits on the beam was a top skill. Now, gymnasts travel the beam by flipping, twisting and leaping high in the air. When Comaneci scored a perfect 10.0 on the uneven bars, her big skill was a handstand, and she performed no twists or flips in the dismount. In the 2008 Olympics, top athletes, such as Nastia Luikin, performed high-flying release moves, one-handed pirouettes and flipped or twisted two rotations in the dismount.
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