The first European Games took place in Baku in June 2015, and gymnastics was one of the largest sports on the programme. Five disciplines shared the schedule: artistic, rhythmic, trampoline, acrobatic and aerobic gymnastics. For many athletes in the smaller disciplines it was the first time they had competed inside a full Olympic-style multi-sport event, with an athletes' village, opening ceremony and broadcast coverage to match.
A new kind of stage
Multi-sport events change how a competition feels. Gymnasts share a village with judoka, swimmers and cyclists, and the audience includes people who have never watched a pommel horse routine. For acrobatic and aerobic gymnasts, whose world championships rarely reach mainstream TV, Baku offered unusual exposure.
The Azerbaijani hosts had invested heavily in gymnastics infrastructure, and the National Gymnastics Arena went on to host several European and World events in the following years.
How the programme was organised
Rather than copying the full programme of each discipline's own championships, the European Games ran condensed competitions, with every discipline fitting its events into a shared gymnastics schedule over roughly a week.
People and stories
Our contemporary coverage from Baku included spotlight interviews with gymnasts across the disciplines, from Dutch artistic gymnast Lieke Wevers to Greek rings specialist Eleftherios Petrounias, who would become Olympic champion on rings a year later in Rio. The variety of those conversations reflects what made the event different: artistic stars and acro pairs were treated as part of the same team story.
The legacy
- It proved that all European gymnastics disciplines could share one stage without losing their identity. - It opened the way for the second European Games in Minsk in 2019. - It influenced the later move towards multi-sport European Championships, first in Glasgow in 2018 and then in Munich in 2022.
Related
See gymnastics at the 2019 European Games for the second edition, and our feature on Munich's multi-sport European Championships.
