The men's pommel horse was a gymnastics event contested as part of the Gymnastics at the 1964 Summer Olympics programme at the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium. The event was held on 18, 20, and 22 October. There were 128 competitors from 29 nations, with nations in the team competition having up to 6 gymnasts and other nations entering up to 3 gymnasts. The event was won by Miroslav Cerar of Yugoslavia, the nation's first medal in the pommel horse. Silver went to
Shuji Tsurumi
is a Japanese gymnast and Olympic champion. He was part of the first Japanese team that succeeded to win gold medals in the team event at the Summer Olympics (1960) and World Championships (1962). In 2008 he was inducted to the International Gym ...
of Japan, the third man to win multiple medals in the event (adding to his 1960 bronze). Yury Tsapenko of the Soviet Union took bronze, breaking a three-Games gold medal streak for the Soviets.
Background
This was the 11th 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). All six finalists from 1960 returned: joint gold medalists Eugen Ekman of Finland and Boris Shakhlin of the Soviet Union (who had also won gold in 1956), bronze medalist
Shuji Tsurumi
is a Japanese gymnast and Olympic champion. He was part of the first Japanese team that succeeded to win gold medals in the team event at the Summer Olympics (1960) and World Championships (1962). In 2008 he was inducted to the International Gym ...
of Japan, fourth-place finisher
Takashi Mitsukuri
is a Japanese gymnast and Olympic champion.
Mitsukuri competed at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome where he received a gold medal in ''team combined exercises''.Yury Titov of the Soviet Union, and sixth-place finisher Takashi Ono of Japan. Miroslav Cerar of Yugoslavia was the reigning (1962) world champion; Shakhlin had finished second and Mitsukuri third.
Algeria, the Republic of China, Iran, and Mongolia each made their debut in the men's pommel horse. The United States made its 10th appearance, most of any nation, having missed only the inaugural 1896 Games.
Competition format
The gymnastics all-around events continued to use the aggregation format. Each nation entered a team of six gymnasts or up to two individual gymnasts. All entrants in the gymnastics competitions performed both a compulsory exercise and a voluntary exercise for each apparatus. The scores for all 12 exercises were summed to give an individual all-around score.
These exercise scores were also used for qualification for the apparatus finals. The two exercises (compulsory and voluntary) for each apparatus were summed to give an apparatus score; the top 6 in each apparatus participated in the finals; others were ranked 7th through 128th. For the apparatus finals, the all-around score for that apparatus was multiplied by one-half then added to the final round exercise score to give a final total.
Exercise scores ranged from 0 to 10, with the final total apparatus score from 0 to 20.Official Report, vol. 2, p. 362.
Each gymnast competed in both compulsory and optional exercises, with the
median
In statistics and probability theory, the median is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution. For a data set, it may be thought of as "the middle" value. The basic fe ...
scores from the four judges for the two sets of exercises were summed. This score was also used in calculating both individual all-around and team scores.
The top 6 advanced to the final for the apparatus, keeping half of their preliminary score to be added to their final score.