1974 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships

The 18th Artistic Gymnastics World Championships were held in Varna, Bulgaria, in 1974. This was the first world championships at which the individual all-around titles were contested in a separate session of competition, rather than being decided after the team competition.

The World Championships were originally awarded to Varna. However, there were significant concerns over whether all athletes would be able to obtain visas, which the Bulgarian federation could not guarantee, particularly those from Apartheid-era South Africa, as Bulgaria did not have diplomatic relations with South Africa at the time. In April 1974, the World Championships were moved to Munich, but at another International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) meeting in July, they were returned to Varna in a vote of 26 to 24. Neither Bulgaria nor West Germany was pleased by the series of decisions, with accusations coming from Bulgaria that the FIG was trying to force them to accommodate "South African racists", while the vice president of the West German Gymnastics Federation criticized the FIG for not upholding its statute that all FIG members must be granted visas to compete and wrote, "Gymnastics became illegitimate in Varna."^[1]

Several parties alleged corruption in the scoring during the competition. Frank Endo of the United States, writing for Gymnastics magazine, said that both the Japanese and American delegations had heard that Yuri Titov had told Soviet judges to underscore their teams.^[2] Olga Korbut also alleged that two of the event final golds were arranged in advance; when she saw her scores for the uneven bars in the event final, which gave the gold to East German Annelore Zinke, she asked Titov to file a protest, and he refused so that Ludmilla Tourischeva would receive gold on the floor final in exchange.^[3] Titov, on his part, complained that the head judge, Walter Lehmann, and the FIG president, Arthur Gander, intervened to ensure that Shigeru Kasamatsu won the individual all-around title over Nikolai Andrianov.^[4] Minot Simons II, also writing for Gymnast magazine, alleged that judges were told to raise scores in several instances during the women's event, especially for the Hungarian gymnasts, as the head of the women's technical committee was from Hungary.^[5] During the women's team optionals, the crowd protested for around twenty minutes after Ann Carr was given a score they thought was too low.^{[5]: 15 [6]}

After the 1972 Summer Olympics, the starting score for a common women's vault was lowered, and the rules for qualifying for vault finals were changed, leading to more difficult vaults being seen at the World Championships compared to two years earlier.^[5]