| Event: | Gymnastics |
| Games: | 1968 Summer |
| Venue: | National Auditorium |
| Dates: | 21 October – 26 October 1968 |
| Prev: | 1964 |
| Next: | 1972 |
At the 1968 Summer Olympics, fourteen different artistic gymnastics events were contested, eight for men and six for women. All events were held at the National Auditorium in Mexico City from October 21 through October 26.[1]
The scoring in all the events was similar to that of the gymnastics events at the 1960 Summer Olympics. The six best gymnasts on the apparatus in the team competition (by sum of two scores - for compulsory and optional routine) qualified for that apparatus finals. The new feature of the competition was in women's events: each of them was judged by four judges, like the men's competition. The highest and lowest marks were dropped and an average of two remaining marks constituted the score.
| Individual all-around | ||||
| Team all-around | Yukio Endo Sawao Kato Takeshi Katō Eizo Kenmotsu Akinori Nakayama Mitsuo Tsukahara | Sergei Diomidov Valery Iljinykh Valery Karasev Viktor Klimenko Victor Lisitsky Mikhail Voronin | Günter Beier Matthias Brehme Gerhard Dietrich Siegfried Fülle Klaus Köste Peter Weber | |
| Floor exercise | ||||
| Horizontal bar | none awarded | |||
| Parallel bars | ||||
| Pommel horse | ||||
| Rings | ||||
| Vault |
| Individual all-around | ||||
| Team all-around | Lyubov Burda Olga Karasyova Natalia Kuchinskaya Larisa Petrik Ludmilla Tourischeva Zinaida Voronina | Věra Čáslavská Marianna Krajčírová Jana Kubičková Hana Lišková Bohumila Řimnáčová Miroslava Skleničková | Maritta Bauerschmidt Karin Janz Marianne Noack Magdalena Schmidt Ute Starke Erika Zuchold | |
| Balance beam | ||||
| Floor exercise | none awarded | |||
| Uneven bars | ||||
| Vault |
Larisa Petrik's gold medal on floor was very controversial because originally, Čáslavská won outright. After the competition was concluded, Petrik's prelims scores were changed to let her tie with Čáslavská, an action which caused Čáslavská to publicly defy the Soviets who had recently invaded her home country. A similar controversy occurred in the balance beam, where Čáskavská was denied gold altogether.[2]