ANCIENT ORIGINS

GYMNASTS BOUNCE INTO THE 21ST CENTURY

Gymnastics, one of those few sports that can claim a classical birth, is not what it was in ancient times. For a start, the athletes no longer perform naked as they did at the Olympiad of old, "gymnos" being the Greek word for "naked".

Secondly, to go by monosyllabic comments made at post-victory press conferences, there appears to be little left to remind us of the original purpose of the sport; the Greeks believed that symmetry of mind and body was possible only when the physical was balanced by the intellectual. Then there's the fact that trampolining will bounce the sport into the 21st century in Sydney.

The gymnasium of ancient Greece, where the sport was born, was a place of cultural, artistic, musical and philosophical well-being, and gymnastics was an activity advocated by various luminaries, including Plato, Aristotle and Homer, though the Greeks were not alone in the gym in those early days. The sport was also used for training soldiers in China, India and Persia.

However, the fear of Roman Emperor Theodosius I in 393AD that the stars of the Games were rivals to his immortal status led to gymnastics being banned. It was not until street acts became popular in the 1700s that gymnastics became popular once more as writers and intellectuals revisited the themes explored by the ancient Greeks.

The sport then branched out into the two factions, the rigid purpose of the military and the more artistic purpose beyond soldiering, which gave rise to "artistic gymnastics" in the early 19th century and led to the first "modern" gymnastics competitions in the latter part of that century. The sport was very popular in Russia, where the likes of playwright Anton Chekhov and other social reformers formed the Russian Gymnastic Federation in 1883.

Gymnastics at the Games has a long history of producing multi-medal winners and minute women of 18 going on 12. Among the most famous have been Larysa Latynina, one of only three women in Games history along with Dawn Fraser and Krisztina Egerszegi, the swimmers, to win the same title at three successive Games, the tiny Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci, of Romania, who in Montreal in 1976 scored a perfect 20 (requiring a 10 from every judge) in the asymmetrical bars.