Artistic Gymnastics at the 2020 Summer Olympics

The United States topped the medal table at Rio in 2016 with 12 medals, including four golds, while Great Britain were second with six medals. China and Russia, who topped the medal chart in 2012, could only manage one gold between them in Rio. In Tokyo, however, they both had strong male teams. The US medal tally in 2016 was helped considerably by one person, Simone Biles, and she was clear favourite to dominate the women’s gymnastics competition in Tokyo, and add to her tally of four golds and one bronze won at Rio. No matter what she did at the Games, Biles made history before the start of competition when she became the first Olympian to have her own Twitter emoji, with the aptly named “Goldie the Goat” – standing for G. O. A. T (Greatest of all time). Sadly, the Biles of 2016 was not to be replicated five years later.

The artistic gymnastics events were held at the Ariake Gymnastics Centre in the northern part of Tokyo’s Ariake District. It was a temporary construction built especially for the Olympics, with a 12,000-seated capacity. After the Games a new sporting arena was planned to be built on the site.

Qualification rounds were held to decide which gymnasts would progress to the team-all round, individual all-round, and individual apparatus finals. The number of gymnasts in the all-round team event was reduced from five to four in Tokyo. Scores on all apparatus were made up of an execution score (E score) and the difficulty score (D score). The E score started at 10 and marks were deducted by judges for any errors. The D score was the total marks calculated by judges for each move performed by the gymnast as per the “Code of Points”, which is renewed every Olympic cycle

The oldest female gymnast in Olympic history, 46-year-old Oksana Chusovitina was back for her eighth Games in Tokyo, going back to Barcelona 1992, when she won the first of her two medals, gold in the team all-round.

Because Simone Biles withdrew after just one event in the all-round team competition, the Games were deprived of seeing her add to her medal tally. The ROC dominated both men’s and women’s team all-round events and, in the men’s, individual all-round gold went to Japan for a third successive Games when Daiki Hashimoto became the next king of Japanese men’s gymnastics. Some American pride was restored in the women’s individual all-round event when Sunisa Lee, the first Hmong American gymnast, took Biles’ crown off her. It was a memorable Olympics for Brazil’s individual all-round silver medallist Rebeca Andrade. She was not only the first South American women to appear in the all-round final, but also the first Brazilian woman to win an Olympic gymnastics medal.

The 2012 and 2016 individual all-round champion, Japan’s Kohei Uchimura, and one of the greatest male gymnasts ever, was going for his third consecutive title in Tokyo, and hoping to add to his collection of seven Olympic medals. He was only competing on the high bar, but failed to qualify for the final after a bad fall during the qualifying rounds. His score of 13.866 was not good enough to qualify him for the apparatus final and his Games were over on the first day of gymnastics competition.