The vault is one of only two gymnastic apparatus on which both male and female gymnasts perform -- the other is the floor. The vault table is 125 cm or nearly 4 feet high and 95 cm or 3 feet wide. It sits perpendicularly at the end of a 78- to 82-foot runway. Like many gymnastic events, the vault's history has its roots in warfare training and entertainment.
Origins
Gymnastics origins date back to ancient Greece. Nearly 5,000 years ago, acrobats would run towards a charging bull, grab the horns and do a series of aerial moves as they were tossed over the bull's back. Later Alexander the Great and the Romans practiced mounting and dismounting horses using a wooden-apparatus designed with a head and tail. Modern gymnastics developed from the physical education programs of Johann Friedrich GutsMuths and Friedrich Jahn of Germany who used vaults that resembled horses with a neck.
Vaulting in Competition
Gymnastics was included in the first modern Olympics in Greece in 1896. By that time, head and tail were removed to allow the vault to be converted to a pommel horse. The vault was 35 cm wide and male gymnasts would vault over the length, not the width as women do.
Evolution of the Vault
The narrow width of the vault was blamed for many injuries. In 1983, Dieter Hofmann, a former East German coach, began a campaign to change the vault saying it was too narrow for men's shoulders and therefore contributed to injury. Women suffered casualties from misplacing hands on the vault. In 1991, following a serious vaulting injury to Trent Dimas at the Indianapolis World Championships, then vice-president of the Federation Internationale de Gymnastique called for a creation of a new vault design. The Pegases vaulting table debuted in 2001 at the World Championships in Belgium.
Notable Vault Gymnasts
In 1904 George Eyser and Anton Heida, both from the United States, tied for the gold medal in vault. At the time George Eyser had a wooden leg. As of 2011, no American man has won the gold medal in the vault since Frank Kriz in 1924; however, Mitch Gaylord tied with three others to win the silver medal at the 1984 Olympics. Before earning perfect scores in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci earned a perfect score on the vault at the American Cup at Madison Square Garden in New York. In 1984, Mary Lou Retton scored a perfect 10, twice in a row at the Los Angeles Olympics. In the 1996 in Atlanta Kerri Strug heroically performed a second vault after injuring her ankle on the first vault.
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