Gymnastics Artistic Men's Parallel Bars Final - Gold: Zhe Feng (China) - Silver: Marcel Nguyen (Germany) - Bronze: Hamilton Sabot (France). Highlights from the North Greenwich Arena at the London 2012 Olympic Games. -- 7 August 2012

Artistic gymnastics was introduced at the very first Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens, and has been present at every edition of the Games since then. At the beginning, it comprised disciplines that are difficult to qualify as 'artistic', such as climbing and acrobatics.

The foundations of the Olympic gymnastics programme were laid at the 1924 Games in Paris, when the men's apparatus individual and team competitions appeared. In 1928, women were included in the Amsterdam Games. It was not until 1952 that the women's programme was developed, with seven events, and then stabilised at six events as from the 1960 Games in Rome..