Faster, Higher, Stronger

Stories of the Olympic Games: Gymnastics (1x2)

Air date: Jul 10, 2012

The series telling the history of the Olympics continues with the story of gymnastics at the modern Games. It explores a never-ending pursuit of perfection by athletes constantly pushing their sport to greater and greater levels of technical difficulty both on the floor and up on the high apparatus. Like Olga Korbut, who transformed gymnastics with revolutionary new routines that risked everything in Munich in 1972; and Nadia Comaneci who picked up the baton and went one further by scoring the first perfect ten out of ten in an Olympics at Montreal in 1976. One of most inventive Olympic gymnasts, Vera Caslavska, re-lives the protest she made at the Soviet invasion of her country Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Mexico Games, and Japanese athlete Shun Fujimoto recounts the extraordinary story of how he competed with a broken knee to ensure his team won Gold.