Gymnastics, with a long history dating all the way back to the first Olympic Games, fuses strength and agility with the style and grace of a true performance. Men in ancient Rome, Persia, India, and China practiced similar skill sets to prepare for battle. The Federation Internationale de Gymnastique (FIG) was formed in 1881 as the governing body of gymnastic sport. Since the start of the Modern Games, the FIG has overseen the separate disciplines that make up Olympic gymnastics. Currently there are three different events: artistic, rhythmic, and trampoline.

Both men and women compete in artistic gymnastics, but the two sexes complete different events. Men compete against one another on floor exercise, still rings, vault, pommel horse, high bar, and parallel bars.  Women compete on vault, beam, floor exercise, and uneven bars. Judges used to score competitors on a scale of ten. Now there is still an execution score from 1.0-10.0, but the difficulty score is separate and the two scores are added together. There is no maximum difficulty score right now, but no one has yet reached 18.0. Only women compete in rhythmic gymnastics, and they do so on a floor area, in five separate routines, using five different devices – a ball, hoop, rope, clubs, and ribbon – with a greater emphasis on the aesthetic than on the acrobatic aspect. The final and newest Olympic gymnastics discipline is trampoline. In trampoline, introduced at the 2000 Sydney Games, both men and women compete in four different events including individual, synchronized, double mini, and power tumbling while scoring points for the difficulty of the moves executed in the air.

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