A Brief History of Vaulting

The first Olympic vault champion was the Soviet gymnast, Ekaterina Kalinchuk. Unfortunatley, I couldn't find any footage of her, or infact, any refrence to her other than she won the medal by 0.1 with a 19.20. She scored a 9.70 in the compulsory vault, and a 9.50 in optionals.

The first vault champion I could find (decent) footage of was Vera Caslavska, a Czech gymnast (who is very well documented, by the way), in 1968:

Two years after the olympics came the debut of one of the most famous vaults, the Yurchenko:

This became a staple vault for gymnasts and still is today, all be it with a bit more twisting. In fact, every olympic gold medalist on the vault since 1988 has used a yurchenko vault. In 1988, Sveltlana Boginskaya was the vault champion using Yurchenkos, a tucked full and a straight full. In 2008, Hong Un Jong became vault champion using a 2.5 twisting Yurchenko.

There has been a lot of fuss recently about the Amanar vault. First performed by Simona Amanar at the 2000 Olympics, the Amanar is a 2.5 twisting yurchenko and notriously difficult. Here's its debut:

The yurchenko made the path for other vaults using the round off entry, the Podkopayeva (A roundoff, half on, front pike with a half twist off), the Khorkina (round off, half on, tucked rudi) and more recently the Cheng (roundoff, half on, straight rudi). Here's the most difficult of these, the Cheng: