Sports comp

An important contribution to the development of physical culture, both of his time and of subsequent centuries, was made by the German physician and philanthropist J.K.F. Gutsmuts. He not only wrote textbooks on gymnastics and swimming, as well as a work that popularized sports games, but also introduced gymnastic equipment still in use, including a modernized gymnastic horse and horizontal bar, as well as pole vaulting[23]. Gymnastics actively developed during the 19th century in many European countries, where it was given applied importance in the context of the growth of national self-consciousness and the need for mass military training. Their gymnastic schools appeared in France, Denmark, the German states, Switzerland, the Czech Republic (at that time part of the Austrian Empire) and Sweden. The Swedish teacher Hjalmar Ling, the son of the therapist Per Ling, developed a number of gymnastic equipment used to this day - a bench with a saddle (a further development of the gymnastic horse), a beam, a wall bars, a jumping springboard [24]. In Russia, by the beginning of the 20th century, the Czech, Swedish and German gymnastic schools, as well as their own system of physical education, developed by P.F. Lesgaft[25], were especially popular.

The website of the international convention "SportAccord", which unites over 100 international sports federations, offers a definition of sport, which includes the following criteria: a competitive element; lack of rules based on an element of chance or luck; elimination of unnecessary risk to the health and safety of participants and spectators; non-deliberate harm to living beings; the absence of a monopoly of a single manufacturer on the necessary equipment[2].