They were receptive that the sport had promise, he recalls, but said there were far too few gymnasts and countries involved. In , a team from a Japanese university was invited to perform at the Olympics closing ceremony in Brazil. A high school well-known for its rhythmic gymnastics team created a group called Blue Tokyo to build opportunities for gymnasts to keep performing after school.
The sport is taken so seriously in Japan, some private high schools have dorms where gymnasts are required to room together to boost camaraderie and teamwork, said Sarah Hodge, a travel writer who lives in Japan and works to get the sport international recognition.
Fan sites are popping up on social media. She thinks of it as like figure skating, without ice. Sections U. Science Technology Business U.
In Her Releve we are all about inclusiveness, but there are reasons why men's rhythmic gymnastics is not an Olympic sport.
Let's dig into this! Currently, we find two different methods of this sport, the so-called Japanese School and the Spanish school. MRG, however, was not popular in the rest of the world. Competitive Rhythmic Gymnastics as we know it nowadays started in the Soviet Union in the s, and it became FIG approved in the '60s. It became part of the gymnastics discipline branch that had a masculine version of the sport, Artistic Gymnastics.
Many professionals and the general public considered Rhythmic Gymnastics as the alternative feminine version of the sport, and at this stage, Men's RG wasn't even considered as an option at the time, WAG was the men's version of the sport. Men's RG didn't catch any attention as it was seen as 'too feminine'. The Japanese school is nonetheless, not traditionally feminine at all. It's packed with strength, dynamic and powerful tumbling elements that replace the graceful moves and dance steps.
Around 1, boys and men are involved in rhythmic gymnastics, and some are trying to expand its reach around the world, dreaming of a day when it will be recognized in the Olympics. But others remain cautious that international recognition could tarnish their beloved sport and force them to relinquish control over the style they have been perfecting for 70 years.
The Olympic version performed by women was born in the Soviet Union, and Russia remains dominant in the sport. Women wear dramatic, jeweled leotards, and their performance is centered on elegance and flexibility.
There are medals for individual performers and groups of five women, who move in such perfect harmony they look to be connected by invisible string. They are forbidden from doing the high-intensity tumbling seen in artistic gymnastics, like flips and handsprings. In the Olympic version, women toss and catch four apparatuses: ribbons, hoops, balls and a pair of clubs.
The men also use clubs but trade the others for a stick, rope and a set of small rings. Underneath the video, the replies were effusive. Giulia Steingruber, a Swiss elite gymnast and Olympic medalist, asked Thorpe if he would mind loaning her some of his flexibility for the next few weeks as she competes in Tokyo. Others suggested that he submit the skill for valuation so he can get rewarded for it in a future competition. One person even suggested that his leap was so good, it was on par with those of the rhythmic gymnasts, whose leaps are exceptional and completely overspit.
As to why he posted the video to Twitter, Thorpe wrote: "I was proud of it. It is as simple as that. And it should be just that simple. But as some of the more wistful responses indicated, men's gymnastics doesn't reward the kind of beauty and artistry that Thorpe had demonstrated in that brief clip. Previously when Thorpe posted videos like this one, the response, while mostly positive, came largely from fans of women's artistic gymnastics WAG.
What struck him this time was the cohort responding. The problem is that the leaps that Thorpe wants to perform aren't even listed in the Code of Points for men's gymnastics on floor exercise. In a points-based sport like gymnastics, where athletes try to rack up as many of those as possible, this means that a male gymnast who performs leaps will receive no credit for doing so.
Perhaps there aren't a lot of male gymnasts who wish to do leaps and turns in their routines; I haven't surveyed everyone so I have no way of knowing. But Thorpe certainly wants to do them and I doubt that he's the only one. But the fact that an entire category of floor movement is simply absent from the rulebook is not a simple oversight.
It speaks to the fraught relationships that men's gymnastics has with being associated with women's gymnastics and femininity. This is why, until about a year ago, Thorpe was reluctant to share these kinds of skills. But as I have grown into my identity, I have lost that concern of what people think," Thorpe, who is openly gay, said in an interview. From almost the very beginning, men's and women's gymnastics have effectively been different sports.
The modern version of men's gymnastics emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and its initial purpose was to prepare men for soldiering. Georgia Cervin writes that Johann Gutsmuth, the "grandfather of gymnastics," wanted the sport to "counteract "effeminate education. Women's gymnastics was created later and with a very different agenda — to teach elegance, flexibility, and good posture, and thus prepare women for their roles as wives and mothers.
This is one of the reasons why it was allowed into the Olympic pantheon in with little resistance from sporting officials. The IOC vastly preferred this "feminine appropriate" sport to the women's track and field events they also added in The IOC and other international federations didn't want to encourage women to display qualities that they had marked as "masculine," such as speed, strength, and aggression.
The early version of women's gymnastics didn't highlight any of those qualities. Though in the early years, the apparatuses were in a bit of flux for the women — they dabbled in parallel bars and the flying rings for a spell — when the sport settled into its current form in , the women were left with four events for them to the men's six. And two of the women's apparatuses were quite dancey — the floor exercise and the balance beam.
In early versions of the women's Code of Points, phrases such as "harmonious flexibility and feminine grace" appeared, Cervin observes. Looking back across gymnastics history, it's not possible to consider male and female gymnasts side by side since there is only minimal overlap in terms of equipment and movement styles.
This is the reason why I sometimes vacillate between calling Simone Biles the "greatest female gymnast of all-time" and dropping the gender qualifier altogether. I don't know how Biles would be at rings or pommel horse because she doesn't train or compete on those events, and I don't know how good Kohei Uchimura , the greatest male gymnast of all-time, would be on the balance beam. That said, there is this old clip of Biles messing around on a mushroom, which is a training aid for men's pommel horse, and she isn't too shabby.
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