Vault – Karacsony and Cuk – Gymnastics Coaching.com

A book review by site editor Rick McCharles

This is the best of their 4 men’s apparatus books, so far.

And definitely the best of the series for coaches of women as there’s a lot of WAG content.

Vault
Methods, Ideas, Curiosities, History (2004)

by Istvan Karacsony and Ivan Cuk
Forward by Mitsuo Tsukahara

… Tsukahara started working “his” vault on the women’s horse in 1969 as his Yamashita (the winning vault of the day) was poor.

He competed Tsuk successfully at Worlds 1970. (Andzej Szajna from Poland was first to attempt Handspring Front, at the same meet, but sat down the landing.)

There’s a chart showing who first did each vault for men and women, regardless of whether or not it’s named after them in the respective codes. That will help answer a few coach arguments.

The history of this apparatus is fascinating, the first historic images dating back to 2500 BC.

This text documents the evolution of both horse and spring board.

Interesting statistics from Worlds 2002 (20m distance run):

• most women took 13-15 steps
• most men took 13-14 steps

The main reason I like this text the best of the four in the series is the detail. Vault has much less content than the other apparatus, so (in the same 150 pages) the authors could include more biomechanics, specific conditioning, etc.

Even if you fancy yourself a vault expert, you’ll still learn a lot from this book. If you could only get your hands on it. There’s no world wide distribution, as yet. (Leave a comment if you know of someone who might want to distribute for them.)

The conclusion was no surprise:

The faster you run, the better. Male gymnasts should strive for over 10m/sec velocity. Female gymnasts over 9m/sec. peak velocity, decelerating as little as possible on board contact.

Zamo topped out at 9m/sec at the 2002 Worlds, for example. Dragalescu was well over 10m/sec.

The most argued phase is not clarified all that much … the hurdle for non-Yurchenko vaults.

Time of the hurdle is between .24 and .30 seconds. Maximum height of the feet was 35cm. But the conclusion I wanted (the shorter the time for any given velocity, the better) is not there.

There is an interesting finding that I’d not seen anywhere else. The top Yurchenko vaulters (i.e Scherbo) have a longer round-off. (i.e. 322cm from the take-off foot to the landing on the Board)

Obviously you need to run fast to do that.

OK.

There are a hundred other interesting points in this manual.

• Defer’s morphological statistics one month prior to winning the 2000 Olympics
• statistics on Dragalescu’s vault
• technique on selected vaults
• conditioning drills

There’s a long section written by Matej Tusak on the psychology of vault, including preventing burnout. Strategies for success.

…Back in the 1990s we several times sent boys to train with Karacsony in Hungary. And several times had him come to Canada as a guest coach. I see many of his favourite vault drills in this manual.

Istvan Karacsony is on the Men’s Technical Committee.