Spectator sports are liked by everyone, or almost everyone. The combination of grace, music, incredible sports elements using a ball, ribbon, hoop, etc., how can you not look at it... Yes, yes, we will talk about rhythmic gymnastics and how it originated.
It's no secret that many things, traditions, sports came to us from antiquity. Even then, people tried to express themselves through dance, rhythmic movements. Gymnastics, as a system of bodily exercises aimed at achieving physical harmony, was created and developed in Ancient Greece. After complete oblivion during the Middle Ages, gymnastics began to revive again only in the 14th century.
If we talk about Russia, here in the 18th century the teaching of physical education as an academic discipline was introduced by Empress Catherine II. Gymnastic exercises, along with dancing, were taught in both departments of the Smolny Institute - “for noble maidens” and “for representatives of the bourgeois class.”
For many centuries, dance and gymnastics developed in parallel and independently, so that at the turn of the twentieth century they met and laid the foundation for the development of one of the most popular, sophisticated and spectacular sports - rhythmic gymnastics.
The founders of this sport at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries are considered to be: Francois Delsarte, Georges Demeny, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze and Isadora Duncan. The creativity of these people served as the basis for the emergence of rhythmic gymnastics in the future.
According https://usghof.org/ modern rhythmic gymnastics is a sport that includes elements of dance, plastic arts, ballet and circus arts, as well as some elements of acrobatics.
This sport owes its birth to three areas:
Each of these sports areas contributed its own detail: the expressiveness of the body is aesthetic gymnastics, dance movements from women’s, and the musical arrangement is rhythm.
And what was the result...
The most beautiful Olympic sport appeared back in 1934 at the Higher School of Art Movement named after P.F. Lesgraft in Leningrad (St. Petersburg).
The following well-known studios at that time were involved in its creation: Zinaida Verbova’s School of Plastic Arts, the plastic department of the Temas studio by Alexandra Semenova-Naipak, the Petrograd Institute of Rhythm, Elena Gorlova’s artistic movement studio and many, many others. At the Higher School named after P.F. Lesgraft and took the first lessons, the main subject of special training for students at the school was called “rhythmic gymnastics”. It was there that Leningrad teachers determined the full scope of the program material for this sport, and also developed the very first rules of the competition.
The first graduates of this school in 1938 were: Yulia Shishkareva, Anna Larionova, Tatyana Varakina, Ariadna Bashnina, Lidiya Kudryashova, Tatyana Markova, Sofya Nechaeva. These names are forever inscribed in the history of rhythmic gymnastics.
The first tournaments were only city ones, the name of the first champion in rhythmic gymnastics is also known,
in 1941 she became Yulia Shishkareva. And the first master of sports in 1954 was Liliya Nazmutdinova.
And only seven years later, gymnasts had the opportunity to test their strength at the first Russian Championship, where Muscovite Lyudmila Zotova became the first prima donna of domestic gymnastics.
The best gymnasts in the country still participate annually in the Russian Championships. The global sports community could not help but pay attention to the new direction in sports, and in 1963 the first World Championships in rhythmic gymnastics were held. It took place in Warsaw, and the prizes were shared by L. Savinkova, T. Kravchenko, E. Averkovich.
The first world championship in this sport was held only in 1963 in Warsaw. The winners were L. Savinkova, T. Kravchenko, E. Averkovich.
European championships began to be held only 15 years later, and after another 6 years, rhythmic gymnastics was officially recognized as an Olympic sport. Great credit for making this decision belonged to the President of the FIG, Yuri Titov (now the Honorary President of the FIG).
It is believed that the list of Olympic sports was replenished by Russia; rhythmic gymnastics is our gift to the world Olympic movement.
The year 1967 was also significant for gymnasts. Then a fundamentally new team event appeared in world rhythmic gymnastics - group exercise competitions. The first World Group Exercise Championships took place in 1967 in Copenhagen. Six gymnasts from the Soviet Union won.
In any sport, one can single out the strongest country; in rhythmic gymnastics, Russia (USSR) and Bulgaria are considered leaders. These two countries have been fighting each other since 1960.
All athletes dream of glorifying their country at the Olympic Games and gymnasts are no exception. If you track Olympic victories in this sport, then:
