For gymnasts, the most infuriating thing to hear is that gymnastics is “not a sport.”
Despite having a clear winner, requiring extreme athleticism and being a sport in the Olympics, some still claim artistic gymnastics does not meet all of the criteria, and therefore is not a sport.
However, this assertion does not hold up when examined closely.
What even is a sport? According to Oxford Languages, it is “an activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.”
Regarding physical exertion, artistic gymnastics is one of the most physically demanding activities one could do.
In the USA Gymnastics program (USAG), lower-level gymnasts train 1-3 hours per week and the highest non-professionals train up to 30 hours per week.
“I trained 4 days a week, an hour in the morning and 3 hours in the evening,” said Mrs. Sergi, GOA guidance counselor and former Level 8 gymnast.
During practices, gymnasts develop their endurance, strength and flexibility across each event: floor, vault, uneven bars and beam for women; floor, vault, pommel horse, rings, high bar and parallel bars for men.
For example, while floor routines are only around 90 seconds, gymnasts need to have the energy to complete two to four tumbling passes, each beginning with a sprint and ending with a launch into the air.
To build this endurance, gymnasts do cardiovascular exercises like practicing the routines with sprints instead of tumbling or doing high intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts.
“I have so much respect for gymnasts. People don’t realize how hard they train just to make everything look easy,” said sophomore Rebecca Luftig.
A typical practice involves conditioning, a time dedicated to improving strength and endurance, in addition to training across the events.
“Before practice even starts, we all have to climb a 20-foot long rope three times, complete 20 reps of three different types of push ups, two laps of walking in a handstand and 20 lunges on each leg,” said Capri Esposito, a competitive gymnast at Diamond Gymnastics Academy (DGA) in Cranford, New Jersey. “Actual conditioning is at the end. It’s even harder because we’re already exhausted from the rest of practice.”
Even with intense and frequent practices, learning a skill takes months, if not years.
For most gymnasts, the process involves doing exercises that target small parts of a skill, doing it with a coach’s assistance, doing it independently on modified equipment (like using a trampoline instead of the floor) and then transitioning to standard equipment.
Beyond physical difficulty, gymnasts often face severe mental challenges that take a long time to overcome and can hinder performance.
“I had a huge mental block on one of my beam skills,” said DGA Level 2 gymnast Valeria Rodriguez. “I honestly think that it took about 2 years to finally do it by myself, because the transition from low beam to high beam felt so scary.”
Besides the skill needed, there are many ways to compete.
The definition claims that in sports, athletes compete individually or as a team, but in gymnastics, athletes do both.
At competitions, gymnasts compete and are scored individually based on their execution and difficulty. At the end, the three highest all-around scores on each team form a collective team score, which is compared to other teams.
“It’s a lot of pressure not knowing if your score could be the one to define your team’s success,” said sophomore Shira Max, a USAG level 10 gymnast. “But I like how we’re competing together too, showing off how hard we work in practice as a team. We have this motto in the gym, AAO WFO: against all odds, we fight on.”
The last component is entertainment, and gymnastics’ international popularity speaks for itself.
In the 2024 summer olympics, NBC’s Day 1 Qualifications broadcast attracted 41.5 million viewers, the largest TV audience of the 2024 games, according to Global Impact Gymnastics Alliance.
“I really like watching artistic gymnastics. It’s so exciting and suspenseful to see if they’ll stick their routines or not,” said sophomore Logan Gladstone. “It’s also impressive how they can move their bodies in that way. It doesn’t seem humanly possible, but they do it somehow.”
College gymnastics also attracts a large crowd: at Michigan State’s meet against UCLA, they needed to select a larger venue to accommodate demand.
As you can see, gymnastics clearly fits the definition of a sport. So next time someone claims otherwise, prove them wrong!
