It’s Dangerous From the Start : Gymnastics: Some officials and coaches wonder if the spectacular Yurchenko vault is worth the risk.

Kelly Garrison knew the risk every time she ran down the runway toward the vaulting horse.

She knew that proper timing and accuracy were a must in international gymnastics and that the slightest slip could mean the difference between winning and losing, or between winning and injury.

But while training at the University of Oklahoma for the 1988 Olympics, Garrison decided to take an extra risk.

Her hopes of making the team had been sinking, along with her vaulting scores. She lacked the power on her takeoff and was earning low scores on the vault, which in turn dropped her all-around results.

So in 1987, Garrison began experimenting with the Yurchenko, a roundoff entry to the vault named after Soviet gymnast Natalia Yurchenko, who introduced it in 1983.

It didn’t take Garrison long to learn the maneuver. She built up plenty of speed on her approach run, then whipped into a roundoff cartwheel just before landing backward on the springboard for her takeoff. The Yurchenko gave her the extra momentum she needed to be competitive, and it helped her land a spot on the Olympic team.

“It was a drastic improvement,” said Garrison, who scored a 9.8 with a Yurchenko at the Seoul Olympics. “I had been a weak vaulter, scoring around 9.4 and 9.5. It really helped my all-around score.”

But as her scores increased, so did the risk. The roundoff entry had little margin for error, and when Garrison missed the springboard or slipped off, she sailed backward, headfirst, into the vaulting horse.

“I crashed probably about 30 or 40 times (in training),” she said. “I had a lot of bruises, but nothing serious. I’m very fortunate, as many times as I landed on my head.”

But some others haven’t been as fortunate:

--Julissa Gomez, a member of the U.S. national team, slipped when practicing a Yurchenko at the World Sports Fair in Tokyo on May 5, 1988.

Her foot fell off the back of the springboard and she sailed backward, headfirst, into the vaulting horse.

She suffered a hyper-extended neck, then fell into a coma at a Tokyo hospital after an oxygen hose slipped off a tracheotomy tube.

Eighteen months after her accident, Gomez, 16, is still in a coma.

--Karen Tierney broke a vertebra in her neck while attempting a Yurchenko at the 1987 U.S. Olympic Festival in Raleigh, N.C. Tierney recovered and still practices the vault daily.

Some gymnasts and coaches say those accidents should never have happened. They say they’re tired of seeing young U.S. gymnasts trying high-risk moves, such as the Yurchenko, to keep up with their competition.

Mary Lou Retton used a conventional approach--a simple run to the end of the takeoff board--when she scored two 10s on the vault to win the all-around title in the 1984 Olympics. She calls the Yurchenko a short cut to high scores.

“I don’t think they weed out the best vaulters (with) the Yurchenko,” she said. “Gymnasts don’t need much speed when they throw a roundoff. I really don’t care for it.”

But even the conventional approach has proven risky. Adriana Duffy, a member of the Puerto Rican national team who also competed for Stanford, suffered a broken neck recently doing a conventional vault at the World Championships in Stuttgart, West Germany.

Svetlana Boginskaia of the Soviet Union, who used a Yurchenko when she won the gold medal in vaulting at the 1988 Olympics, said there’s little risk with the roundoff approach.

“I’ve never had a problem with it,” she said through an interpreter last Sunday while participating in an exhibition at the Forum. “It’s an easy vault for me.

“It’s a vault that’s very much in style. Almost everyone is using it now. Maybe someone should come up with a new vault.”

Olga Korbut, the star of the 1972 Olympics when she made women’s gymnastics a glamour sport with her back flip off the uneven parallel bars, has watched women’s gymnastics blossom in the Soviet Union in the last 17 years. She said that complex moves such as the Yurchenko have a small place in gymnastics.

“I don’t think it’s the element that is dangerous, but how the athletes approach them,” she said. “There have been a lot of changes in gymnastics that do not gladden my heart. I feel that the complexity of the (elements) have overshadowed the femininity of gymnastics.”

Oklahoma Coach Becky Buwick, who helped Garrison learn the Yurchenko, said the roundoff entry is a flashy alternative to conventional vaulting. Gymnasts score between 9.4 and 10 with a roundoff entry, depending on the difficulty of the vault.

“With Kelly being an old-timer (she was 21 at the time), not having a (Yurchenko) would have been a good reason to keep her off the (Olympic) team,” Buwick said. “Everyone was using them. We were definitely pressured to make sure she was keeping up with the (younger Americans) and the Soviets.”

The Yurchenko is banned by the NCAA, and Buwick hopes it stays that way.

“I hope we never see it at the college level unless there are some big-time changes in equipment,” Buwick said. “The bottom line is that they need to do something with the equipment before it will be safe to do it.

“It’s a beautiful vault, but a dangerous one.”

In the wake of the Gomez tragedy, the U.S. Gymnastics Federation banned the Yurchenko at level 10--the highest class a gymnast can reach before moving on to Olympic training--so it could be studied. The USGF still allows the Yurchenko at the Olympic, national and elite levels.

Don McPherson, who owns a gym in Lombard, Ill., recently wrote a letter to USGF officials asking that the Yurchenko be banned at all levels. He said the maneuver is too risky and he won’t allow the 220 gymnasts he coaches to try it.

“The whole thing of going after the Russians is ridiculous,” he said. “It’s like E.F. Hutton. When (the Soviets) talk, we listen and scramble back to our gyms to work on it. It’s a disservice to teach them the (Yurchenko) vault.”

But coaches and athletes who work with the Yurchenko say that the move is only another frontier in gymnastics, and that progress and risks are part of the sport.

Don Peters, owner of SCATS Gymnastics in Huntington Beach, said the Yurchenko is worth the risk. Peters, who has coached Olympians Kathy Johnson and Pam Bileck, said that at least 20 of his gymnasts use the Yurchenko.

“It’s not any more dangerous than 30 or 40 other (gymnastic maneuvers),” he said. “But it has to be approached cautiously.”

Bill Sands, who has a doctorate in exercise physiology and is the director of sports sciences for women with the USGF, said the vault is one of the safest events in gymnastics. Only 5% of all gymnastic injuries occur on the vault, and most injuries are to ankles and wrists, he said.

Sands, a former assistant coach at Utah, directed a study on the Yurchenko for the USGF after Gomez was injured. He broke down the approach biomechanically and found that the Yurchenko doesn’t necessarily give a gymnast extra momentum off the springboard.

“It didn’t appear to have an enormous amount of velocity,” he said. “But the Yurchenko makes it easier to do certain (vaults) well . . . “

Yurchenko accidents usually occur when gymnasts land either too far forward on the springboard or when their feet slip off the back, as Gomez’s did.

Peters said that the USGF has required a foam mat installed around the springboard to provide extra cushion should a gymnast’s foot slip off the back of the board.

Instead of teaching the vault to older, more mature gymnasts, Peters said he would rather take a youngster and develop the Yurchenko over a long period of time.

Soviet coaches begin simulating Yurchenkos with gymnasts as young as 8 and they have been developing the vault since the 1970s, McPherson said.

Injury statistics for the Eastern Bloc countries aren’t available, but even its creator discovered how risky it can be.

Yurchenko, the Soviet gymnast, used her maneuver to win the all-around at the 1983 World Championships. The next day, she broke both ankles when she landed while attempting the same vault in the individual event finals.

Yurchenko continued to use the vault after her injuries, however, as did Garrison.

Despite the accidents during training, Garrison was glad she used the Yurchenko.

“There’s risk anymore in all the skills,” she said. “It’s just a matter of working on them consistently.

“It’s a good vault. There are many things that can still be done with it. Originality is such an important part of gymnastics right now.”

But her coach, Buwick, said she isn’t sure if the risk is worth it.

“Anyone who knows of Julissa Gomez’s injury knows that it’s a nightmare you have as a coach,” Buwick said. “Every night, when I go to turn off the lights in the gym and leave, I stop and thank God that nothing like that happened.”

BACKGROUND In the 1972 Olympics, 17-year-old Olga Korbut of the Soviet Union wowed audiences with her spectacular display on the uneven bars, punctuated by an unprecedented back flip on the landing. In that competition, the teen-ager changed the appeal of women’s gymnastics. It became big box office, and gymnasts soon found themselves doing increasingly risky routines on all of the events, sometimes with tragic results.