The men's horizontal bar competition was one of eight events for male competitors in artistic gymnastics at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne. There were 63 competitors from 18 nations (down sharply from the 185 gymnasts in 1952), with nations in the team competition having up to 6 gymnasts and other nations entering up to 3 gymnasts.[1] The event was won by Takashi Ono of Japan, with his countryman Masao Takemoto taking bronze. Silver went to Yuri Titov of the Soviet Union. Japan and the Soviet Union each earned their first horizontal bar medals.
Background
This was the ninth appearance of the event, which is one of the five apparatus events held every time there were apparatus events at the Summer Olympics (no apparatus events were held in 1900, 1908, 1912, or 1920). Four of the top 10 gymnasts from 1952 returned: fifth-place finisher Viktor Chukarin of the Soviet Union, seventh-place finisher Helmut Bantz of Germany, and ninth-place finishers Berndt Lindfors of Finland and Valentin Muratov of the Soviet Union. Muratov had won the 1954 world championship, with Bantz and Boris Shakhlin of the Soviet Union tying for second.[1]
Australia and Canada each made their debut in the men's horizontal bar; East and West Germany competed together as the United Team of Germany for the first time. The United States made its eighth appearance, most of any nation, having missed only the inaugural 1896 Games.
Competition format
The gymnastics format continued to use the aggregation format, mostly following the scoring tweaks made in 1952. Each nation entered either a team of six gymnasts or up to three individual gymnasts. All entrants in the gymnastics competitions performed both a compulsory exercise and a voluntary exercise for each apparatus. The 2 exercise scores were summed to give an apparatus total. No separate finals were contested.
Exercise scores ranged from 0 to 10 and apparatus scores from 0 to 20.[2]
