From the Perfect 10 to Open-Ended Scoring

For decades, a 10.0 was gymnastics’ most famous number — most of all after Nadia Comăneci received the first one awarded at the Olympics, on uneven bars at Montreal in 1976. The scoreboard hadn’t been built to show 10.0, so it displayed “1.00”. The open-ended scoring system used today was introduced by the FIG in 2006.

How the perfect-10 system worked

Under the old Code of Points, each routine had a start value: a base score, awarded if the routine met all its requirements, plus bonus points for difficult skills and combinations. Gymnasts tried to build routines with a start value as close to 10.0 as possible, and the judges’ deductions for form, steps, falls and other faults came off that start value. On vault, each vault had a fixed start value.

Over time, the base score was lowered so that gymnasts had to earn more of their 10.0 through bonus:

Athens 2004: the result that changed the system

The men’s all-around final at the 2004 Athens Olympics exposed how fragile the old system could be. Paul Hamm of the United States won with 57.823, ahead of South Korea’s Kim Dae-eun (57.811) and Yang Tae-young (57.774). It then emerged that Yang’s parallel bars start value had been given as 9.9 instead of 10.0, because the judges had misidentified one of his skills — a missing 0.1 that, on paper, would have been enough to change the result.

The FIG suspended the three judges responsible but did not change the results, and the Court of Arbitration for Sport dismissed the Korean appeal on 21 October 2004, saying that deciding who “would have won” was “in the realm of speculation, not of certainty”. The controversy brought the reliability and objectivity of the scoring system into question, and the FIG overhauled it.

What changed in 2006

The new Code of Points, adopted in 2006, separated the two things the old score had blended together:

• a D-score for difficulty, with no upper limit — the more a gymnast attempts, the higher it can go;
• an E-score for execution, starting from 10.0 and reduced by deductions.

The final score is the two added together, so there’s no fixed maximum, and the “perfect 10” effectively disappeared. Supporters argued the change would reward difficult skills and make judging more objective; critics worried it would reduce fan interest, de-emphasise artistry, and leave gymnasts with low difficulty out of contention before they had performed.

Within months the new system was producing results the old one couldn’t: at the 2006 World Championships, Italy’s Vanessa Ferrari won the women’s all-around despite a fall on beam, helped by the high difficulty of her floor routine.

Today

Under the 2025–2028 Codes of Points, the same structure holds. The women’s Code’s own example shows how it adds up: a D-score of 5.70 plus an E-score of 9.00 gives a final score of 14.70. See how gymnastics scoring works, the D-score and the E-score.