ABSTRACT

The focus of this special issue has been on a subject often marginalised by the history of sport community – gymnastics. There are various reasons for the widespread lack of interest in gymnastics among sport historians. For one thing, gymnastics is a term which has different meanings in different languages and refers to widely diverging concepts and practices ranging from gymnastics on apparatus to expressive movement cultures. For another, gymnastics has changed its meaning in the course of history. J.C.F. GutsMuths, the founder of a modern, educationally oriented concept of physical training, borrowed the word ‘gymnastics’ from the Greek, a term denoting the physical exercises practised naked (gymnos) by young men in ancient Greece. Both in Greek antiquity and in Gutsmuths’ new concept gymnastics signified a system of cultivating, strengthening and exercising bodily abilities and skills.