VIDEO: Beautiful Gymnastics Routine

“Great pace and great rhythm” says the announcer.

These three young Ukrainian gymnasts can’t hide their disappointment when the scores are announced.

They got nothing less than a 9 from any of the judges, but still…

Somehow, despite performing seemingly inhuman acts of strength and balance, the team came in third behind Russia and Great Britain in the 2010 World Championships.

According to Wikipedia, Gymnastics is a sport that requires balance, strength, flexibility, agility, endurance and control. The movements involved in gymnastics contribute to the development of the arms, legs, shoulders, chest and abdominal muscle groups.

Gymnastics developed in ancient Greece, in Sparta and Athens, and was used as method to prepare men for warfare. In Sparta, among the activities introduced into the training program was the Agoge or exhibition gymnastics made up of gymnastic elements in the form of the Pyrrhic-a dance in a military style-performed for state dignitaries in the final year of a student’s training.

The maneuvers were performed naked except for the tools of war. Athens combined this more physical training with education of the mind.

At the Palestra, a physical education training center, the discipline of educating the body and educating the mind were combined allowing for a form of gymnastics that was more aesthetic and individual and which left behind the form that focused on strictness, discipline, the emphasis on defeating records, and focus on strength.

In the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany, two pioneer physical educators – Johann Friedrich GutsMuths (1759–1839) and Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) – created exercises for boys and young men on apparatus they had designed that ultimately led to what is considered modern gymnastics.

Don Francisco Amorós y Ondeano, was born on February 19, 1770 in Valencia and died on August 8, 1848 in Paris. He was a Spanish colonel, and the first person to introduce educative gymnastic in France. Jahn promoted the use of parallel bars, rings and high bars in international competition.

The Federation of International Gymnastics (FIG) was founded in Liege in 1881. By the end of the nineteenth century, men’s gymnastics competition was popular enough to be included in the first “modern” Olympic Games in 1896.

From then on until the early 1950s, both national and international competitions involved a changing variety of exercises gathered under the rubric, gymnastics, that included for example, synchronized team floor calisthenics, rope climbing, high jumping, running, and horizontal ladder.

During the 1920s, women organized and participated in gymnastics events. The first women’s Olympic competition was primitive, only involving synchronized calisthenics and track and field. These games were held in 1928, in Amsterdam.

By 1954, Olympic Games apparatus and events for both men and women had been standardized in modern format, and uniform grading structures (including a point system from 1 to 15) had been agreed upon. At this time, Soviet gymnasts astounded the world with highly disciplined and difficult performances, setting a precedent that continues.

Television has helped publicize and initiate a modern age of gymnastics. Both men’s and women’s gymnastics now attract considerable international interest, and excellent gymnasts can be found on every continent.