Sports
Gymnastics
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Gymnastics is a sport involving exercises that require strength, flexibility, balance and body control, performed on apparatus or as floor routines. The name descends from the ancient Greek gymnasion, a training ground for physical exercise tied to Greek ideals of physical education from around the fifth century BC, but modern gymnastics as a systematized sport is a distinct development: the German educator Friedrich Ludwig Jahn founded the Turnverein movement and opened the first outdoor gymnasium, the Hasenheide, in Berlin in 1811, and his system of apparatus based training is the direct ancestor of the modern competitive sport.
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Origin Year1811 marks Friedrich Ludwig Jahn founding of the Turnverein movement and the Hasenheide outdoor gymnasium in Berlin, usually cited as the birth of gymnastics as a modern systematized sport. The name and general purpose trace to the ancient Greek gymnasion more than two thousand years earlier, but the two are related by name and inspiration rather than by direct continuous practice, so no single origin year covers both. Originating RegionAncient Greece (for the name and antecedent ideal); Germany (for modern nineteenth century systematization) 1 International Governing BodyThe International Gymnastics Federation, founded 1881, headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, the oldest existing international sport federation. 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
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