Your Guide to Olympic Gymnastics: Vault

For two weeks every four years, women’s gymnastics is one of the biggest sports in the world. The rest of the time, those of us watching are kind of a niche group.

That can make it hard to fully appreciate what you’re seeing when the athletes take the Olympic stage. If you want to know what’s required on each apparatus, or what that skill you saw was, or how to distinguish good routines from great ones, we’re here to help.

Here, we’ll look at the vault, starting with a broad overview and then moving into the technical details. We also have guides to the uneven bars, balance beam and floor exercise.

The basics

Gymnasts sprint down an 82-foot runway, use a springboard to propel themselves onto the vault (sometimes called the vaulting table or just the table), push themselves into the air and perform flips and twists before landing on the mat.

Many gymnasts, mainly those who don’t specialize in the event, complete only one vault. But those who want to qualify for the vault final must attempt two, and their methods must be from different “families.” (More on that later.)

Gymnasts receive one score for difficulty and one for execution, and the two are combined. A gymnast who performs a difficult vault with some flaws can outscore one who does an easier vault cleanly. And while landing errors may be the easiest to spot, what happens in midair is just as important: A gymnast who takes a step but has impeccable form can score more highly than one who sticks the landing but has sloppy form.