The thing that's really interesting to me is the transition between the 60s and the 70s. In the 60s, bar routines still looked a lot like aerobics exercises on an apparatus. But by the 70s, we had circling skills to handstand, single bar releases, and the predicates for today's transitions. I guess they say that Korbut brought something special and new and acrobatic in '72, and then by '76 everybody was trying to do that. Then by the 80s, the new style of women's gymnastics was fully up and running.
I also wonder a lot about what was lost from earlier decades because we didn't have footage of it. In videos like this you tend to see Vera Caslavska and Larisa Latynina representing the 60s. Korbut and Comaneci for the most part representing the early 70s. But videos probably weren't taken except at major competitions like the Olympics - I wonder what was done in training, or with gymnasts from less-well-represented countries that maybe didn't take any medals home.
