The men’s and women’s gymnastics competition in Rio has ended. Goodbye, gymnastics. You were a pleasure to watch.
Respectfully, though, before you go, we’d like to ask about your bar nomenclature?
We’ve noticed that you have three distinct, bar-centric events: the horizontal bar, the parallel bars, and the uneven bars. The first two are part of the men’s contest, and the third takes its place in the women’s rotation. (There is also a beam, which could technically pass for a bar, in the women’s rotation, but we will ignore that for now.)
We’re sympathetic to your need to differentiate these three events. But we find ourselves perplexed by the way you’ve labeled them. The horizontal bar, for instance. All of the bars in gymnastics are horizontal. Otherwise they would be poles. Calling a piece of athletic apparatus a “horizontal bar” makes as much sense as calling it a “vertical pole.”
We are just trying to understand. Do swimmers compete in a “pool of water”? Do soccer players kick a “spherical ball”?
We’d like to respectfully suggest that you rename the “horizontal bar” event the “single bar.” Doing so distinguishes it from the other two bar-themed contests, each of which involves, if not a plethora of bars, more than one bar.
We believe that clarity when it comes to proper bar taxonomy is in your best interest.
Moving along to the parallel bars, they are parallel, yes, but so are the uneven bars. We defer to your judgment, but that seems confusing to us.
We recommend that you call the two that are even “the even bars.”
And the uneven bars, they can just remain “the uneven bars.”
Those are all of our suggestions about bars.
