Performance rating in men’s world elite artistic gymnastics: a status-quo study on scoring tendencies at Olympic Games following rule changes

ABSTRACT In artistic gymnastics, rule changes in the year 2006 aimed to reduce the dominance of difficulty while strengthening performance differentiation. Related research on scorings often refers to analysing the proportion of difficulty and execution scores. For this, several studies preferred analyses of punctual major competitions predominantly neglecting long-term effects on performance differentiation. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the effects of the International Gymnastics Federation’s (FIG) modified performance rating system on the importance of execution and difficulty and performance differentiation in men’s world elite artistic gymnastics following rule changes. The results’ lists of the five recent Olympic Games (i.e. qualification competitions of Athens 2004, Beijing 2008, London 2012, Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2021) including the difficulty, execution and final scores of the TOP20-ranked gymnasts in each event were analysed. Compared to Athens 2004, results revealed significantly enhanced performance differentiation (p < .01) with the execution score nowadays to predict the final score (p < .01). However, both general findings need to be discussed with respect to apparatus-specific phenomena. We suggest these findings to reflect positive impacts of rule changes on performance rating in world elite men’s artistic gymnastics due to intended scoring tendencies.