What Is Women’s Artistic Gymnastics?

Women’s Artistic Gymnastics is the discipline most people picture when they hear the word “gymnastics”: a gymnast flying above a bar, balancing on a beam about four inches wide, and tumbling across a sprung floor to music.

Women’s Artistic Gymnastics, almost always shortened to WAG, is a sport built on four very different challenges performed on four pieces of equipment called apparatus. A gymnast must be powerful enough to launch off a vault, strong enough to swing and release on bars, calm enough to stay on a beam, and expressive enough to perform a floor routine to music. Very few sports ask one athlete to be so many things at once.

A Short History

Gymnastics is one of the oldest organised physical disciplines in the world, with roots in ancient Greece. The modern competitive form took shape in Europe in the nineteenth century. Women’s participation in Olympic gymnastics grew through the early programme, and the modern women’s artistic programme became established from 1952 onwards. Since then it has become one of the most watched sports of every Summer Olympics.

The Four Apparatus

A complete WAG gymnast trains and competes on all four apparatus, in this Olympic order:

Vault: a single explosive run, hurdle, and flight over a vaulting table.
Uneven Bars: a continuous swinging routine between two bars set at different heights.
Balance Beam: a routine of acrobatics and dance on a beam ten centimetres wide.
Floor Exercise: a choreographed routine to music combining tumbling and dance.

Each apparatus is explored in detail in the next chapter.

How Competition Is Structured

Gymnastics competitions usually award several kinds of medals from the same set of routines:

Team: the combined scores of a country or state’s gymnasts.
All-Around: one gymnast’s total across all four apparatus. The all-around champion is widely considered the most complete gymnast in the field.
Event Finals: separate medals for the best gymnast on each individual apparatus.

Sub-Junior, Junior, Senior

Gymnastics uses age categories. Under the international body, a gymnast is generally a senior in the calendar year she turns 16, and a junior below that. In India, Artistic Gymnastics national championships are commonly run in Sub-Junior, Junior, and Senior categories, so younger athletes compete fairly against their peers. The exact ages are set each season by the federation.

Who Governs the Sport

Internationally, the sport is governed by the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG), founded in 1881 in Belgium and now based in Lausanne, Switzerland. The FIG writes the rulebook, the Code of Points, that decides how every routine in the world is scored. In India, the sport is governed by the Gymnastics Federation of India (GFI), which runs national championships and selects athletes for international duty. Chapter 3 looks at the Indian system in detail.

Gymnastics asks one athlete to be powerful, brave, precise, and artistic, often inside ninety seconds.

Why WAG Is So Demanding

Gymnastics is regularly ranked among the most technically demanding sports in the world, for reasons that add up quickly. The skills are complex and performed at speed. The margin for error is tiny: a routine that takes years to build can be judged in under a minute and a half. The sport demands strength, flexibility, power, balance, air awareness, and artistry in the same body. And it is judged, which means an athlete must not only perform well but perform so a trained panel can see it. That blend of power and grace under pressure is why this sport, once it is in you, rarely lets go; Part 2 explains how it is judged.