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Wednesday, May 26, 2021

Parallel


This 1911 photo of a man on the parallel bars really shows off some muscles.

 

4 comments:

  1. However surprisingly, from mid- to late-Victorian times until the Great War, it was deemed perfectly decent for Central and Eastern European strong men and gymnasts and weight lifters to wear only an elasticated support which was effectively the equivalent of a dance belt. They didn't use jockstraps, which were largely limited to the English-speaking world. Do you perhaps have a provenance for this superb photograph?

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    1. Considering the source, I was lucky to get the year.

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  2. P-bars were first used 200 hundred years ago by the Germans as training equipment for other gymnastic events. They didn't appear in the Olympics until 1896 and then only used as an overall score, not as an independent event. They made Olympic appearances off and on until about 1932 when they were considered an individual event with it's own score and medal. The handstand he's doing is one of the first moves a gymnast learns on that apparatus. The reason for the apparent nudity is for safety reasons. Today's gymnasts always wear tight fitting (usually lycra) workout clothes to keep their clothes from getting tangled in the equipment. A hundred years (plus) ago, practicing in the nude or near nude was the best way to workout and not get your "junk " caught up and twisted (painful). Up until the 1800's all Olympic events were done in the nude.

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    1. Between you and Calorman, I've learned a lot today.

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