Kurt Thomas, who became the first American to win a world championship event in men’s gymnastics when he captured gold in the floor exercise at Strasbourg, France, in 1978, died on Friday. Thomas’s wife, Rebecca, who owned and operated a gymnastics center with her husband in Frisco, Texas, near Dallas, told International Gymnast magazine that he had a stroke on May 24. Thomas followed up his breakthrough at the 1978 championships by winning five world championship individual medals in 1979, including gold in the floor exercise once more and in the horizontal bar, at Fort Worth, and he finished sixth in the all-around standings, based on his totals in the six individual events and his individual triumphs. He joined with Bart Conner as trailblazing figures among American men in a sport in which women had garnered most of the attention and in which China, France, Japan and the Soviet Union had dominated men’s international gymnastics.

Source: New York Times June 07, 2020 22:41 UTC