A few months ago I had a chance to watch Georges St-Pierre competing in an Ultimate Fighting Championship match on TV. At first I was reluctant, but it eventually piqued my interest as GSP displayed a lot more skill than I was expecting. I learned that he relies on gymnastics training to achieve dominance in his sport!

Georges St-Pierre: “I’m doing gymnastics to keep my body healthy, to change my routine, and I love gymnastics as well and it makes me a better athlete.”

Georges St-Pierre, Ultimate Fighting Championship

It got me thinking that gymnastics really is the “ultimate” sport. Take a gymnast and put him in pretty much any other sport, and he’s likely to achieve a moderate degree of success, but taking established stars in other sports and putting them in gymnastics could results in some rather awkward moments. Gymnast Amy Chow, who has an Olympic medal of each colour, has gone on to excel in not just pole vaulting but diving as well. (Oh, and she’s a paediatrician too!)

Amy Chow, Diving

Yelena Isinbayeva won the 2008 Olympic gold in pole vaulting after growing too tall for gymnastics. At 3:31, Isinbayeva is seen training in the gym, doing tucked Tsukaharas on vault, free hips and giants on bars, and even exercises on the rings! She explains: “Gymnastics gives me more coordination, more precision.”

Yelena Isinbayeva, Pole Vaulting

This reminds me of when I saw Alex Wong on So You Think You Can Dance. At the time, I remember thinking that if gymnastics can serve as the basis of sport, then ballet could well be the basis of dance. Here’s a classically trained ballet dancer who was able to learn a complicated hip hop routine in just a few days, and perform seamlessly with All Star Twitch. I couldn’t believe my eyes!

Alex Wong, Ballet

Alex Wong, Hip Hop

Okay, so last time I made a Top 10 list of my favourite floor routines ever (I kinda forgot the fantastic routine Dominique Dawes did in 1992 and 1993, but luckily RJL commented on that!). I promised that my next post would be a list of the worst floor routines ever, so here goes….

After a lot of deliberating, I decided to narrow it down to just three routines. Unfortunately, there seems to be a theme (a lot of Romanian routines from the late 1970s!).

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When I first set out to create a Top 10 list of the best floor routines ever, I had no idea what a task it would become. How could I leave out gymnasts such as Svetlana Boginskaya, Oksana Omelianchik, Maria Filatova, Natalia Ilienko? Believe it or not, I did consider making this a Top 10 Soviet Routines from the 1980s list…well, anyway, here is a compilation of ten of my favourites. Enjoy!

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Part of my daily internet ritual involves logging on to the Gymnastics Gossip Message Board (GGMB) to see what’s new in the world of gymnastics. Recently, I was intrigued by a thread entitled “Japanese Gymnastics Robot” posted by aevera. I clicked on the video and was amazed by what I saw: a robot doing a piked Kovacs on high bar! The Kovacs, first performed by Peter Kovacs (HUN) on his way to a silver medal on high bar at the 1979 European Championships, has since become a staple on this apparatus. It is described as a double back over the high bar, but by the time the bar is released and caught again, it’s actually a 1.5 back flip.

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In October, I had the opportunity to attend the 2009 World Gymnastics Championships, held at the beautiful O2 Arena in London, England.  I attended four sessions: women’s qualifications, women’s all-around, and both days of event finals.  Gymbit has asked me to share some of my observations from the stands….

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Last week I celebrated the first anniversary of Gymbits! I thought I would mark the occasion by picking out some of my favourite photos that I’ve collected throughout the years. I originally wanted to do a Top 10, but I simply couldn’t narrow it down. So here are 29 of my favourite pictures! (more…)

Gymnasts display so many difficult skills with such grace that it’s easy to forget just how tricky the sport really is. There are times, of course, when things don’t go quite as planned and a Blooper is born….

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Just for a bit of fun, let’s look back at gymnastics comedian Paul Hunt. He was at his competitive peak in the early 1970s, but took to a different kind of performance in the 1980s: creating parodies of women’s gymnastics. He performed in exhibitions under such names as Pauletta Huntescu (ROM) and Paulette Huntinova (URS).

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