Your Guide to Olympic Gymnastics: Uneven Bars

For two weeks every four years, women’s gymnastics is one of the biggest sports in the world. The rest of the time, those of us watching are kind of a niche group.

That can make it hard to fully appreciate what you’re seeing when the athletes take the Olympic stage. If you want to know what’s required on each apparatus or how to distinguish good routines from great ones, we’re here to help.

Here, we’ll look at the uneven bars, starting with a broad overview and then moving into technical details. We also have guides to the vault, balance beam and floor exercise.

The basics

The apparatus consists of two bars, one about five and a half feet high and one about eight feet high. Gymnasts swing in circles around the bars, fly between them, do pirouettes on their hands and perform release moves in which they let go of the bar and re-catch it. The best routines flow from one skill to the next.

Routines must include at least one transition from the high bar to the low bar; one move releasing and catching the same bar; one 360-degree turn, or pirouette on the hands; and at least two different grips, or hand positions.

Gymnasts receive one score for difficulty and one for execution, and the two are combined. The judges deduct for leg separation, flexed feet and other form issues; breaks in momentum; “empty swings,” in which the gymnast loses her balance or rhythm and has to swing back and forth to regain momentum before the next skill; and, of course, falls. It’s also a deduction if she isn’t fully vertical when moving into a handstand or finishing a turn.