Global InformationWorld Artistic Gymnastics Championships information
| Artistic Gymnastics World Championships | ||
|---|---|---|
| Team all-around | men | women |
| Individual all-around | men | women |
| Vault | men | women |
| Floor | men | women |
| Pommel horse | men | |
| Rings | men | |
| Parallel bars | men | |
| Horizontal bar | men | |
| Uneven bars | women | |
| Balance beam | women | |
The Artistic Gymnastics World Championships[1][2] are the world championships for artistic gymnastics governed by the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG). The first edition of the championships was held in 1903, exclusively for male gymnasts. Since the tenth edition of the tournament, in 1934, women's events are held together with men's events.
The FIG was founded in 1881 and was originally entitled FEG (Fédération Européenne de Gymnastique), but changed its name in 1921, becoming the Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG);[3] this name change roughly correlates with the actual naming of the World Championships. Although the first such games were held in 1903, they were not initially entitled the 'World Championships'. The first competition ever actually referred to as a 'World Championships' was a competition held in 1931 that, while referred to in an official FIG publication as the "First Artistic Men's World Championships",[4] often seems to go ignored by various authorities in the sport. The championships prior to the 1930s, beginning back in 1903, would eventually be recognized, retroactively, as the World Championships.[3]
Although the FIG had changed its name from the FEG back in 1921, the true transcontinental nature of the sport would not start to change at the World Championship level until a substantially later time. Perhaps the first non-European delegation to participate at a World Championships was Mexico, which sent a men's team who travelled all the way to compete at the 1934 Worlds in Budapest,[5] a trans-Atlantic endeavor they repeated at the 1948 London Summer Olympics - a rare non-European delegation appearance even 14 years later.
It was at those same 1934 World Championships in Budapest that there was finally the first-ever women's competition[6]: 45 [7] at a world championships, despite women having participated in various world championships since the first such international competition in 1903.[8]
Perhaps the first African contingent was the Egyptian one which offered forth a full male team at the 1950 World Championships in Basel. By the time of these World Championships, a total of 60 male athletes from 6 countries and 53 female athletes from 7 countries comprised the competitive field.[9] By the 2013 World Championships, the competition had grown to include 264 men from 71 countries and 134 women from 57 countries.[9] As of 2023, over fifty editions of the championships have been staged, and over fifty countries have earned medals in artistic gymnastics events.
The most successful nation, both in gold medal results and total number of medals, is the former Soviet Union (not including medals from its successor states), and China is the second. The United States is the third most successful country in gold medal results while Japan is the third in total number of medals. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the traditional powerhouses in men's and women's individual still had expressive results: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, China, United States, Japan, and Romania. The last two decades were marked by increasing results from two emerging powers: Great Britain and Brazil and at the same period a big decrease in results from Belarus, Romania and Ukraine. After a busy schedule and some tests which led to the holding of two separate world championships in 1994 (one for individual events and one for teams), it was decided that in each Olympic year the championship would not be held and that the edition held in the subsequent year of the Games, only the competition individual would be held. However, this cycle was broken in 2021,when the COVID-19 pandemic led to the 2020 Summer Olympics to be delayed by one year, the edition scheduled for that year was not cancelled. While the Games were held between July to August 2021, the World Championships was allocated to the end of the same year.
- ^ "47th FIG Artistic Gymnastics World Championships MONTREAL (CAN)". live.fig-gymnastics.com. Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique. Retrieved 2018-09-06.
- ^ "48th FIG Artistic Gymnastics World Championships DOHA (QAT)". www.fig-gymnastics.com. Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique. Retrieved 2018-09-06.
- ^ a b "History". Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique.
- ^ Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique (2005). 125th Anniversary - The story goes on... FIG. p. 15.
- ^ Macanovic, Hrvoje (June 8, 1934). "X medunarodne gimnastičke utakmice u Budimpešti" [X International Gymnastics Matches in Budapest.]. Sokolsky Glasnik (in Slovenian). Vol. 5, no. 24. p. 6. Retrieved January 13, 2021.
- ^ Huguenin, Andre. 100 Years of the International Gymnastics Federation: 1881-1981 (PDF). Translated by Unger, Beatrice. International Gymnastics Federation.
- ^ History.com, Gymnastics. "1934: Women Compete at the World Championships for the First Time". Gymnastics-History.com. Retrieved April 27, 2024.
- ^ History.com, Gymnastics. "1903: Women's Gymnastics at the First World Championships". Gymnastics-History.com. Retrieved April 27, 2024.
- ^ a b Grossfeld, Abie (June 2014). "Changes during the 110 Years of the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships". Science of Gymnastics Journal. 6 (2): 6. ISSN 1855-7171.