I would have posted this elsewhere, but it doesn't seem that there's a forum for sports that aren't bodybuilding, so I'm posting here.

If I had to guess, I would think that there are at least a few on here (whether active or passive) who are fans of gymnastics. Some of you may know that this year's World Artistic Gymnastics Champions are currently in progress, and today is the last day. Team Finals, All-Around Finals, and half of the Apparatus Finals have already been decided.

I think that this is the first World Championships in over 100 years since the Central/Eastern/Southern Slavic countries made their debut at them that none of them are in the Team Finals. The first official World Championships were in the 1930s, but there were competitions going back to 1903 that have been retroactively recognized as World Championships. The 3rd installment of them in 1907 is when the Bohemian/pre-Czechoslovakian team made their tremendous debut, and the Slavic torch was passed (and retained) from and by them to the Yugoslavians and then to the Soviets. Gymnastics was a European and even Slavic-dominated scene for most of the 20th century. The Central/Southern/Eastern Slavic European countries made probably the majority of the contributions to the overall development of the sport for most of the 20th century, and were really a force to be reckoned with that well back into the 19th century, although international competition didn't come into full swing until early in the 20th century.

Well, in the over 100 years of Slavic/Eastern-Bloc activity in the sport at the World/Olympic level, I am pretty sure that this year's Worlds is the first time in OVER 100 YEARS that no Eastern bloc country made the team finals, and in fact, besides Germany which was only halfway an Eastern bloc country during the era of the Iron Curtain and for some time before that, the only other Eastern bloc team to even show up at this Worlds was the men's Hungarian team which placed last in qualifications. This is tragic.

Also in, the All-Around Finals, no Eastern bloc medalists - making it even worse. There was an Armenian man who won an apparatus final medal (not Gold), and there are a few more individuals who still have chances in the apparatus finals that will be contested later today.

There are a couple of bright spots to these games, however. Brazilian Rebecca Andrade is the first female Latin-American artistic gymnast (and perhaps the first Latin-American gymnast male OR female, not sure I remember exactly) to become World All-Around Champion, and she is amassing quite the collection of World/Olympic medals with this and what she accomplished in the Tokyo Olympics. Also, the Canadian women's team won bronze, and IIRC, this is a first for them at the World/Olympic level.

But what has happened here to the entire Eastern Bloc is unequivocally tragic. We're not just talking about the banning of the Russian and Belarussian athletes, there were also no teams from Ukraine or any of the other post-Soviet Republics, or any of the Balkan nations (Romania, Bulgaria, any of the former Yugoslavian republics, etc), or Hungary (except for their last-place finishing men's team) or Poland, Czechia, or Slovakia. This is a hugely historic and very disturbing omission in the world of sport.