Gymnastics

Gymnastics combines strength, agility, balance and grace. The Olympics feature three disciplines: artistic gymnastics (six apparatus for men and four for women — floor, pommel horse, rings, vault, parallel bars, horizontal bar, uneven bars and balance beam), rhythmic gymnastics (with ball, ribbon, hoop, clubs and rope to music) and trampoline.

History

Modern gymnastics goes back to the school of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn in early nineteenth-century Germany. The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG), founded in 1881, is the oldest international sports federation in the world. Artistic gymnastics has been on the Olympic programme since 1896, rhythmic gymnastics since 1984 and trampoline since 2000.

Major competitions

The Olympic Games, the World and European Championships and the FIG World Cup series. Baku's National Gymnastics Arena hosts World Cup events every year and staged the 2019 Rhythmic Gymnastics World Championships.

Gymnastics in the Turkic world

Hungary is a historic gymnastics power: Ágnes Keleti won 10 Olympic medals, five of them gold, Zoltán Magyar was Olympic pommel-horse champion in 1976 and 1980, and Krisztián Berki in 2012.

Uzbekistan's Oksana Chusovitina is the only gymnast to have competed at eight Olympic Games (1992–2020), winning team gold in 1992 and silver on vault in 2008. Türkiye's İbrahim Çolak became his country's first world champion, on rings, in 2019, and Ferhat Arıcan won bronze on parallel bars at Tokyo 2020. Azerbaijan places high in rhythmic gymnastics and trampoline at European and world events; Marina Durunda competed in the final at Rio 2016.

Famous Turkic gymnasts

Ágnes Keleti, Zoltán Magyar, Krisztián Berki, Oksana Chusovitina, İbrahim Çolak, Ferhat Arıcan and Marina Durunda.