Technical details
Gymnastics at the Olympic Games is split into artistic and rhythmic.
Artistic: There are seven gymnasts in each team, six of whom compete on each
apparatus performing one compulsory and one optional series of exercises.
Four judges mark each exercise out of a possible 10. The top and bottom score
are discarded and the middle two averaged to give the score.
For the team event, the best five gymnasts' scores count towards the overall
total. From the team event, the top 36 scoring (a maximum of three men and three
women from any one country) individuals go forward for the individual all-round
event for both men and women.
The highest combined score wins. There is a final of one optional exercise on
each of the individual apparatus contested by the top eight scoring gymnasts on
each piece in the team event.
Rhythmic: 40 gymnasts take part in the individual all-round competition, consisting of preliminary rounds. The preliminary rounds consist of one optional
exercise to music, using each of the apparatus: ball, club, rope and ribbon.
These exercises are marked out of 10 points and the top 20 go through to the
semi-final.
Five facts
1) The sport of gymnastics dates beyond the Ancient Olympic Games. The Chinese
some 2,000 years earlier practised ritual mass gymnastic exercises as part of
the art of 'Wushu', a highly-stylised martial art.
2) When gymnastics first appeared on the Olympic programme in 1896 it included
events such as rope-climbing and club-swinging.
3) Women first competed in gymnastics events at the 1928 Games in a team
event. It was not until 1952 that individual apparatus was used at the Games.
4) Rhythmic gymnastics was not introduced until 1984 and at the Sydney 2000
Games a new discipline of trampolining was added to the programme, with one
men's event and one women's event.
5) Britain has won two bronze medals for gymnastics: the men's team in 1912
(in Stockholm) and the women's team in 1928 (in Amsterdam).
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