Gymnastics at the 2016 Summer Olympics – Men's horizontal bar

This was the 24th 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). Four of the eight finalists from 2012 returned: gold medalist Epke Zonderland of the Netherlands, silver medalist Fabian Hambüchen of Germany, fourth-place finisher Zhang Chenglong of China, and fifth-place finisher Danell Leyva of the United States. Kōhei Uchimura of Japan was the reigning (2015) world champion, with Leyva the runner-up and Manrique Larduet of Cuba third. Zonderland had won in 2013 and 2014; Uchimura had reached the podium in those years as well.[1]

Cyprus, Lithuania, Monaco, and Turkey each made their debut in the men's horizontal bar. The United States made its 22nd appearance, most of any nation; the Americans had missed only the inaugural 1896 event and the boycotted 1980 Games.

Qualification for the men's artistic gymnastics in 2008 was based primarily on the 2015 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships. The top 8 teams at the world championships could send a full team of 5 gymnasts to the Olympics. The next 8 teams (#9 through #16) competed in the 2012 Gymnastics Olympic Test Event, with the top 4 of those teams also qualifying a team of 5 gymnasts for the Olympics. The individual apparatus medalists from the World Championships also qualified, if their nation had not already qualified a team. There were places reserved for host country and continental representation, and the Tripartite Commission made an invitation. The quota of 98 gymnasts was then filled through the individual all-around rankings at the Test Event, with each nation able to qualify only one gymnast in that manner (though this one gymnast could be added to the world championship apparatus medalists—for example, Romania qualified Marian Drăgulescu as silver medalist in the vault and Andrei Muntean through the Test Event).

The top 8 qualifiers in the qualification phase (with a maximum of two per NOC), advanced to the individual all-around final. The finalists performed on each apparatus again. Qualification scores do not count in the final.

All times are Brasília Time (UTC-03:00)