Having followed gymnastics (women’s gymnastics in particular) for almost 40 years, I have seen many changes and would like to try to understand how the sport has developed over that time, and the direction it may take next. I am particularly interested in linking this thinking to overall cultural, societal and political changes in the world, the way that they have influenced the power structure and the judging of the sport, and the influence it has had on the form of the sport itself and the routines that gymnastics practice and present at national and international competitions. This is a fairly deep area of study that I am not at all familiar with. So I decided to begin a blog as a sort of research diary, to try to develop my thinking and also to get feedback and research references from anyone else out there who may be interested, or who has anything to say on the subject. There will also be a fair deal of cheer leading for my favourite gymnasts. The Russians. Yes, I’m partisan.
In the spring, I went to Birmingham and saw the Russian women win the European team title. Lots of people think that gymnastics is an individual sport – but it isn’t. It is a team sport, and gymnastics shines most brightly in the team format, where the testing of real strength in depth can take place, rather than the lottery that is an all around competition.
The Russians’ win, in some ways, was not that remarkable. To be first in European gymnastics, at this point in time, is about the same as saying that you are third or even fourth in the world, what with the dominance of such countries as China and the USA on the world stage. Now, however, six months later, only a few weeks before the World Championships, the Russian team’s skills and performance are raising eyebrows. Like their Soviet predecessors, the Russian team is beginning to develop strength in depth and to perform intriguing, spectacular gymnastics.
For the past 17 years, since the break up of the Soviet Union, gymnastics has stagnated somewhat. If you are a fan of British or American gymnastics, or any of the other states who have benefitted hugely from the ‘retirement’ of the Soviet Union from big-time sport, you probably don’t like me saying this much. People follow sport for many different reasons: some are highly partisan; others like complicated Codes of Points and developing ranking tables; others like to observe political developments within the sport; still others enjoy following personalities. Gymnastics offers the scope for all of these activities, and more. My particular interests are without doubt partisan, for I follow with passion the fortunes of the Russian team. But they are also artistic, in that I wish to follow a sport where the barriers of the possible are regularly challenged, where expressive performances are the norm rather than the exception, and where the quality of line and shape created in the movement is aesthetically pleasing. In the 1980s, the Soviets introduced a bonus system to gymnastics’ Code of Points. It was known as Risk, Originality, Virtuosity. And, to me, what became known as ROV pretty much sums up everything that I love (or loved) about the sport.
I’ll give you a link to a routine that I consider to represent the epitome of ROV. I suppose most people will think of women’s floor exercise when they consider the aesthetics of gymnastics, but ROV was applicable across all four pieces of apparatus: vault, bars, beam and floor. I’ve chosen beam as an example of the degradation of ROV in the sport because to me it’s where the changes in the sport have become most obvious. The gymnast is Tatiana Groshkova, who rested on the margins of the Soviet team around the late 1980s and early 1990s. She performs here in 1990.
You could set this routine to music, such is the rhythm, form and intensity of the gymnast’s performance. And Groshkova was one of the more ‘staccato’ sprightly gymnasts on the Soviet team at the time!
As a point of comparison, here is Deng Lin Lin’s beam routine from 2009, that won the world championships medal on the beam.
Deng’s form is obviously beautiful, the somersaults are high, the exercise is technically correct. However, where is the ‘routine’? What makes this exercise more than an assemblage of difficulties out of the pages of the Code of Points?
Perhaps you’ll understand better if I turn to the floor exercise for help. Here is Groshkova’s floor routine, again from 1990.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mpl3VI7SQdU
That’s a double twisting in, double back somersault she performs in the first run, with both twists in the first somersault which she performs in a straight position. Such a difficult single move is rarely, if ever, performed in gymnastics these days. Oh and this routine I think shows fairly good interpretation of the music.
Here is Britain’s Beth Tweddle performing her gold medal winning floor routine at the 2009 World Championships.
Again, a relatively technically correct routine, but where is the performance? Does the choreography match the music, or is the background music as important to Tweddle’s movement as that which plays at your local Sainsbury’s is to you, while you do the shopping? Where is the innovation? The risk, originality, virtuosity?
This is not to attack individual gymnasts, but to try to illustrate the background to the thinking and opinion I would like to develop on this blog. For I’m convinced we are seeing modern day echoes of the conflicts between Jahn and Ling that informed the institution of the sport of gymnastics as we know it today. Arguably at its artistic peak during the 1980s and early 1990s, following a model developed by the Soviet Union, gymnastics’ transformation during the 1990s and 2000s into a more athletic model was led internationally and, I would dare to suggest, is particularly imbued with Western capitalist values stemming from the US.
In short, I am saying that the sport as practiced during the ‘Soviet’ era from 1952 to 1992 was as much an art as sport, and that the sport’s progress since 1992 has been characterised by a gradual move towards a more one-dimensional sporting model along the lines of diving, trampolining and acrobatics. This development has been effected through changes in the International Gymnastics Federation’s (FIG) Code of Points. Over time the judging system has moved from a qualitatively-based judging system to an arithmetically-based system of evaluation. There are many arguments that surround the desirability of this change: the influence of the Code itself on routines is one; another is whether perceptions of the sport today as stagnant, stolid and inferior to gymnastics in the past have any foundation; we also must consider the ideological perceptions of the West as regards the transparency and ‘fairness’ of marking, and the ‘wholesomeness’ of the sport; the identity of sport and physical culture itself comes into question; political issues of who holds the power in gymnastics, and who decides what is ‘objective’ and ‘fair’ also come into play. I can hardly begin to discuss these in depth as I have neither the time nor knowledge. But I do hope over time, with my readers’ help and some hopefully well chosen reading, to begin to develop more opinion in this area.
Riordan (1977) writes interestingly about definitions of sport in the Soviet Union, and I think contributes something helpful to our thinking here: the idea that sport was a form of ‘physical culture’ and as such linked to the overall development of society and the individual. Sport, as well as a political means of projecting the nation’s image positively to the world, also provided individuals with a means of self-improvement. I’ll take this a little further to say that if the Soviet work ethic informed the use of gymnastics as a means of providing healthy, hard-working role models, or ‘heroes’ for Soviet society at large, the sport of gymnastics, with its emphasis on effortless performance of amazing artistic and acrobatic feats that in reality took years of gruelling preparation, also fed the Russian cultural liking for refined appearance.
Booth (1997) writes of sports history’s decline and its increasing alignment with Departments of Physical Education in Universities, leading to the chronicle as an important form of sports history, with little criticality or synthesis attempted within frameworks of sociology, cultural studies or politics. It has indeed proved difficult for me to find many references in the area I wish to work in, though my work is at an early stage and this is probably informed by ignorance rather than absence of references.
My main references to date are provided at the end of this piece, and I shall be gradually working through them and commenting on points I find interesting. As the results of world championships and other important competitions become available, I shall also be discussing them here.
References
Aykroyd, P (1987) International Gymnastics: Sport, Art or Science? London: Kingswood Press
Booth, D (1997) ‘Sports History: What Can Be Done?’ Sport, Education and Society Vol 2, No 2 pp 191-204
Riordan, J (1977) Sport in Soviet Society Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Riordan, J (1993) ‘Rewriting Soviet Sports History’ Journal of Sports History Vol 20, No 3, pp 247-258
[Post edited 1.10.10 to provide alternative video of Groshkova's floor - the original version was an exhibition which showed her performing a full in piked somersault and is still available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3S5CrYdSwM. The newly posted version shows Groshkova performing floor at the 1990 European Championships All Around competition. Heartstopping performances, both of them!]
"I’ll give you a link to a routine that I consider to represent the epitome of ROV. I suppose most people will think of women’s floor exercise when they consider the aesthetics of gymnastics, but ROV was applicable across all four pieces of apparatus: vault, bars, beam and floor. I’ve chosen beam as an example of the degradation of ROV in the sport because to me it’s where the changes in the sport have become most obvious. The gymnast is Tatiana Groshkova, who rested on the margins of the Soviet team around the late 1980s and early 1990s. She performs here in 1990."
ReplyDeleteROV ended in 1988, so how would a 1990 competition be an example of it?
Excellent article. I realise this was posted a few weeks ago and I hopee you haven't given up on the idea of writing further on these topics. It's so interesting to hear someone else articulate the views that I am thinking when I watch modern day gymnastics.
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