Bojana Galic. She is a graduate of the Arthur L. Gymnastics demographics show most athletes start very young and continue competing into early adulthood. Video of the Day. Vault into these gymnastics statistics to learn more about this high-flying sport.
Global Gymnastics Statistics. World rankings are calculated based on the total number of points each country wins in competition throughout the year. Gymnastics Statistics. There are about 4,, gymnasts in the U. Gymnastics Demographics by Sex. There are 68, athletes in women's programs. Source: Science of Gymnastics Journal. Gymnastics Demographics by Age. A majority of female gymnasts are 11 to 12 years old, according to USA gymnastics. Most male gymnasts are 9 to Source: USA Gymnastics.
Age Demographics by Skill Level. Statistics About Gymnastics Injuries. There are more than 86, gymnastics-related injuries in the U. Olympic Gymnastics Statistics. At the Olympic Games in Rio, U. The U. Simone Biles was the first American woman gymnast to win 4 gold medals. After winning a gold medal on the vault at the Rio Olympics, Biles become the most decorated gymnast in the U.
Nadia Comaneci was the first gymnast to score a perfect 10 at the Montreal Olympics in , according to the Olympic website. Comaneci has won 5 gold, 3 silver and 1 bronze medal in her career. Laurie Hernandez won 1 gold and 1 silver medal at the Rio Olympics. Japanese gymnast Kohei Uchimura is often considered the greatest male gymnast in history but may not be competing in the Tokyo Olympics due to injury, according to NBC Sports.
World Championship Statistics. Outside of the Olympics, the World Championships are the top gymnastics competition. Gymnastics Level Statistics. Level 4 is the common, with 21, female athletes and 4, male athletes, according to USA Gymnastics. After Level 10, a gymnast is considered an elite athlete. USA Gymnastics currently has 79 elite women and elite men. Historical Facts About Gymnastics. Male gymnasts of this time were already performing complex acrobatics in their exercises, so when they became coaches for women or when coaches for men started training women, they brought that technical expertise with them and started teaching them to the women.
Or, as it turned out, girls. Korbut was trained by Renald Knysh, who she and others later said had sexually abused them. Knysh, who died in , denied the allegations. And Vladislav Rastorotsky — perhaps one of the most innovative coaches of the 20th century, and by reputation a patient one — trained a whole bevvy of gymnasts, including Lyudmila Turischeva, Natalia Shaposhnikova and Natalia Yurchenko.
Cervin pointed out that Rastorotsky drew on the tradition of the Soviet circus for inspiration. And that disaster was entirely predictable. The new age minimum did little to stymie the decline in the ages of female gymnasts, whether they were from the capitalist West or the Communist East.
Training more than five hours a day as a preteen became a norm in the sport that persists to this day. And she remembers a sudden increased focus on very young talent. Then what happens? Do all phenoms die at 12? Where do they go? For certain talented youngsters, the hours start to ramp up quickly so that they will be at an athletic peak by the time they hit 14 or 15, if not earlier, either to start moving down the elite path or to get the attention of college recruiters.
The leap from junior elite to senior is a perilous one, and few junior standouts end up having great results at the senior level. And in many cases, they end up leaving the sport, citing injury and burnout, if they even bother explaining their departure at all. Fink objects to classifying gymnastics as an early-specialization sport. Brehanna Showers, a former University of Oklahoma gymnast, began to specialize at around age 9 — relatively late according to the standards of gymnastics.
When she shifted from recreational gymnastics and a handful of other sports to a more regimented gymnastics schedule, she recalls that her new teammates, many of them between 8 and 10 years old, were already nursing injuries. It is kind of crazy. There were girls who were extremely talented, but their bodies were not going to hold up. What Showers observed anecdotally is supported by most of the available research. Though Showers was training more than 20 hours a week, she refused to give up her other interests.
During this time, she started competing in pole vaulting, something she had to hide from her gymnastics coaches. She was found out when one of her pole-vaulting teammates posted a photo on Facebook of Showers at a competition on her day off from gymnastics. Her coach saw it and told her she needed to stop. But what if gymnastics culture encouraged kids to explore a range of other activities rather than limiting their options? What if coaches viewed other sports as a complement to gymnastics, not a distraction from it?
The weight training gives you stronger muscles, so you become a better tumbler. Gymnastics tends to view itself as foundational to all sports — and perhaps it is — but a consequence of this thinking is that what gymnasts can learn from other sports tends to be discounted. Ellen Casey, a former collegiate gymnast. One of the new physicians for the U. Her expertise is in treating women, particularly female athletes, and she has conducted research on the role sex hormones play in injuries like ACL tears.
In other sports, she noted, some athletes wear sensors on their bodies so there is a steady stream of data to analyze. How much are people training? How old were they when they started doing that training? How many repetitions? The first thing we need to do, or try to do, is establish some sort of baseline. Casey would love to see gymnastics embrace science and start collecting data on itself so that best practices can be established — as well as guidelines on how to intervene to improve training and development.
Gathering this kind of data is particularly challenging, Casey pointed out. And then you have to put it in. That would be gymnasts and coaches primarily dumping data into the system because we have a decentralized system and people training all over the country. And it is a big ask.
But how would that look? The vast majority of gymnasts who have extended their careers into their 20s and beyond have also followed the early-specialization model the sport is known for. Perhaps some of them experienced more humane coaching in their early years, which probably protected their bodies and enabled them to continue longer. But even the patron saint of older gymnasts, Oksana Chusovitina — who, at 46, just competed in her eighth and final Olympic Games in Tokyo — got started at the elite level at the same age as everyone else.
The Olympic artistic gymnastics team was then reduced to six members in and five in Now, it's being whittled down to four athletes, which was why the Rio team in featuring Simone Biles and co. In addition to the four gymnasts who will make up the women's Olympic gymnastics team in Tokyo — Biles, Sunisa Lee , Jordan Chiles , and Grace McCallum — two gymnasts qualified as individuals: Jade Carey , who mathematically secured one of those spots through the World Cup series last year, and Rio Olympics alternate MyKayla Skinner.
Note: on the men's side, they were only allotted one individual spot , not two. The big question, though, is why the four-person team? That meant countries with less depth of talent could potentially compete with dominating nations such as the US and China.
Another reason was that Grandi wanted to put a heavier emphasis on the all-around gymnast those who excel at all four events in women's gymnastics as opposed to "specialists" who were picked for teams in the past because of their specific skillset on one or two events. FIG argued that the extra individual spots awarded to athletes in Tokyo would be a good thing for these specialists, that it would create an opportunity for gymnasts who might not be considered from a team capacity to qualify for the Olympics on their own through other competitions outside of the Olympic Trials like Carey or through a selection committee choice like Skinner and Yoder.
Carey's strongest events are vault and floor, Skinner stands out with her high-difficulty vaults; and Yoder's specialty is pommel horse. However, after much pushback, the team number is returning to five members at the Paris Olympics in So, what will this look like in Tokyo? Put simply, there are four gymnasts competing in the team competition, and all four gymnasts, plus the individual gymnasts or gymnast , in the men's case , have a shot at making it to the all-around and event finals that are separate from the team competition.
However, only two gymnasts from each country can advance into those finals.
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