Three-dimensional Kinematic Analysis of the Yurchenko Layout with 360-degree Twist in Female Vaults: Deterministic Model and Judges' Scores

Abstract

The Yurchenko vault was first introduced by Natalia Yurchenko, a Soviet gymnast, in the 1982 World Cup (Carlton, 1988; Langsley, 1983). It comprises a round-off entry onto the springboard, followed by a back handspring with turns onto the vault table for the post-flight (Yoon, 2003). Since its introduction, numerous female gymnasts have attempted to master this technique, with 89 out of 149 vault techniques being the Yurchenko vault in the 1988 Seoul Olympics (Kwon, Fortney, & Shin, 1990). However, some athletes avoided this technique at that time due to a high risk of injury, as the horizontal configuration of the old vaulting horse created little space for hand contact and the back handspring entry onto the horse gave the gymnast no visual approach to the contact area. The change to the new vaulting horse increased the horse contact area, rapidly popularizing the Yurchenko vault. Currently, it accounts for more than 70% of the vaults performed by female athletes in international competitions, and it has become a comparably essential technique among female athletes in national competitions in Korea as well (Kim & Kim, 2011; Yeo, Kim, & Kim, 2011). One reason behind its popularity among female athletes is speculated to be that it is easier to create angular momentum in the sagittal plane with the Yurchenko vault than with other techniques, thereby being more useful for female athletes, who tend to have weaker blocking on the horse (Park & Kim, 2016). In the early stages, simple Yurchenko layout vaults were the most popular, but Yurchenko layout vaults with a twist began to gain popularity. Athletes performed layouts with 360° twist to even 720° or greater twist; in 2016 Rio Olympic Games, Simone Biles, a US gymnast, earned the gold medal with a Yurchenko layout with a 900° twist (Park & Kim, 2016; Seo, 2016; Yeo, 2006). Unfortunately, however, Korean female gymnasts mostly perform a 360° twisting layout, which corresponds to 5.0 points in the International Federation of Gymnastics (FIG) code of point, widening the technical competency gap from world-class competitors (FIG, 2013). Particularly, there has been no Korean female Korean Journal of Sport Biomechanics 2017; 27(1): 9-18 http://dx.doi.org/10.5103/KJSB.2017.27.1.9 http://e-kjsb.org eISSN 2093-9752 ORIGINAL