Artistic Gymnastics in 1881: The women's four apparatus

Ten seconds of controlled flight, judged to a tenth of a point, after ten years of daily repetition. Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG), founded in Liège in 1881 — the oldest international sports federation On the program at every modern Olympics since Athens 1896; women's events added in 1928

Six for men (floor, pommel horse, rings, vault, parallel bars, high bar); four for women (vault, uneven bars, beam, floor) 14 in total — eight for men, six for women Simone Biles — 41 Olympic and World Championship medals, 30 of them gold (through Paris 2024) Artistic gymnastics asks a human being to leave the ground, rotate about two axes at once, and arrive standing still. Everything else — the apparatus, the chalk, the Code of Points — exists to measure how well that is done. Men contest six apparatus, women four, and each routine lasts between five seconds and ninety. Within those windows a gymnast must satisfy composition requirements, accumulate difficulty, and hide every trace of effort, because the execution panel deducts for bent knees, flexed feet, a hop on landing and a shoulder angle a few degrees off vertical. No sport compresses so much preparation into so little visible time.

The sport's modern identity was set in 2006, when the FIG abolished the perfect 10 and replaced it with an open-ended system: a difficulty score with no ceiling, added to an execution score that still begins at 10.00 and only falls. That single change turned gymnastics into an arms race between what is possible and what is clean. A triple-twisting double somersault is worth more than a double-twisting one, but only if it lands; a fall costs a full point and, in the three-up three-count Olympic team final, usually costs a medal too.