Fifty years ago! Gymnastics was a different sport back in the day.

Olga is one of the best bar workers of all time. Beautiful swing.

Commentators were so rude towards Olga. When you do good they praise you but when you don't in their eyes, they eat you and spit you out alive, shame on them!

You're doing God's work 🙏

Wow, what a watch. Never seen this before.

I was only two years old during these Olympics, then, when I was six during the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, the United States boycotted that one and I don’t remember if it was aired on television or not. The first Olympics I remember watching were the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics with Mary Lou Retton and Julianne McNamara. I was 10 years old by that time, but I was so inspired and wanted so badly to do what they did. Instead, I was a ballerina and had been at that point for at least four years and continued on until I was about 23 years old. I just remember seeing all of the adulation that Mary Lou Retton received, and I wanted that to be me, but there were no competitions for ballet in the Olympics.

Let's talk about the live piano player for floor exercise!  How cool is that!?  I remember this being the deal, but that was a 'few' years ago.

Thank you thank you thank you <3<3<3 This is a thrill to finally watch

Ugh, the equipment was so dangerous and brutal back then. Thin stiff mats, wooden beams and non- spring floor.

A (not) fun fact about the piano playing - I used to play for these kind of events.   We keep a stopwatch/timer sitting up on the music shelf.  The music for each - if it's printed sheet music - has different times notated throughout so we know if we need to speed up or slow down depending on where we are - like they said, the gymnast gets penalized if the routine is too short or too long.

They were all great gymnasts !!!!!!!!!!

Solid wood beam with no covering!
Galling on that was extremely painful and risky.

❤NADIA IS...PERFECT❤❤❤❤

I love that the scoring system seemed more capable of adequately separating the gymnasts.
Olga's routine didn't seem overtime. I'm going to need to see a running  stopwatch. Nm, it was undertime. That sucks.

ok one of the things I found most shocking was that they did the floor to live piano !?!?

So sad for Olga. She took elements out of her beam routine from team optionals, and then got an undertime deduciton. 😢

Was Cathy Rigby watching the competition? She and Schenkel were just making it up as they went along. Weird.

What a lot of  beauties based on almost tragic work.

August. That's a word we don't hear often outside of its temporal or chronological context. Spoken within the first few seconds of this video.

Людмила Турищева в вольных упражнениях была самой артистичной и выразительной. Чуть чуть сложности акробатики не хватило. А чувств было с избытком!