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Vaulting seen by a judge’s eyes

Five minutes with Helma Schwarzmann Don’t blink! If you bat an eyelid you might miss the most spectacular elements of the vaulting competition at CHI AL SHAQAB 2015. Within just 60 seconds the individual athletes display their artistic talent in their freestyle of “gymnastics on horseback”. The six members within the participating teams have four minutes for their fireworks of spectacular movements performed in canter on a circling horse. Spectators are always left in awe watching this. But how do the judges actually decide who will be the winner?

“It is quite challenging and we have to be absolutely fit regarding the rules”, says Helma Schwarzmann. Like the previous year when vaulting premiered in Doha, she will be the Chief Judge scoring at AL SHAQAB. She is already looking forward to the competition that brings international top athletes of the discipline to the Gulf state. “Especially the female competition will be something else”, she says looking at the entries, with World and European champions ready to stun the audience. Whereas riding is the only sport where men and women compete against each other, the individual vaulters have separate classes but teams are mixed. 

Four judges give their marks for individual and team vaulters, performing in three rounds: compulsory, technical and freestyle programs. Pairs are judged only in two freestyles. The judges’s “jobs” are clearly defined. The one sitting at point A of the lunging circle will only observe the horse, the two sitting at 

B and D are scoring the technical value and, during a freestyle competition, the judge at C is responsible for evaluating the artistic score: the outline of the performance, choreography and choice of music, suitable for the “story” of the performance. For reasons of fairness the judges will rotate, changing positions for each of the three parts of a competition. 

The six standard exercises are set in stone and as demanding – or, like some might say, are considered boring to watch – as in gymnastics or figure-skating. Viewers “in the know” love it, others use it as the first introduction to get familiar with the sport. But the freestyle is a different and very exciting story. All possible options are divided into groups of structures. A “stand” is a stand, be it facing forward, sideways or backwards, head up or feet up, on one leg or both. But the level of difficulty varies, earning more or less points, depending on positioning of parts of the body. The same classification goes for deductions in case of mistakes, small, medium or capital ones. The addition of deductions divided by the number of elements shown give the vaulter his or her technical score and, in combination with the artistic score, that decides the competition. The vaulters try to fit as many elements as possible into their performance and that is what makes judging challenging. “We are constantly dictating scores to the scribes next to us. There is not the slightest amount of spare time to think about the “value” as in level of difficulty. You have to know this by heart”, says Schwarzmann whose vaulting experience spans decades. The daughter of an Olympic medal winning gymnast has a record of judging in “regular” gymnastics as well. She started vaulting as a child, earning two national titles with her team in Germany. Then she 

became a judge and coach. Within a decade as a national coach her students won 66 medals, 26 of them gold, at European and World Championships. “Vaulting brought me to all the five continents”, she sums up. Until today she is still giving clinics and trains vaulters all over the world. “I find that a big advantage for judging. I know where the practical problems in execution are”, Schwarzmann says. 

In international vaulting the Horse Score accounts for 25% of the overall score, with the remaining 75% dedicated to the vaulter’s technique, form, difficulty, balance, security and consideration of the horse and the lunger’s ability to manage and control the horse. The horse score is small but more often than not it upsets the ranking. It is noteworthy because it underlines vaulting being an equestrian discipline as opposed to gymnasts just choosing an unusual or different “surface” for their performance. And the horse score makes vaulting into the only equestrian discipline that is actually a threesome. In addition to the horse and vaulter you have the lunger controlling the horse. The better the lunger’s understanding with the horse, the better the vaulter can perform. 

Vaulting has it’s roots in history. Very briefly it even belonged to the Olympic program, 1920 in Amsterdam, executed by male soldiers. In riding clubs, mainly of Europe, vaulting is still seen as a means of basic preparation for riding, but vaulting at international level today has long since developed into an equestrian sport of its own. The best vaulters are using all their creativity to “play” with the groups of structural elements for their freestyles. It is a standard practice to advance the “The 

wheel barrow”, handstand with a partner holding the other vaulter’s legs, and turning it into ”The flying angel”. Like Swiss figure skater Denise Bielmann created the pirouette named for her, some of the vaulting elements are particular for the vaulter who “invented” and developed it. You can’t miss the “Ferrari turn” that made Jacques Ferrari European and World champion. The Frenchman performed it for the first time two years ago, doing a 360 degree turn on his stomach. When the current team world champions of Normandy trained with Ferrari prior to the World Equestrian Games they advanced that move even further by executing Ferrari’s turn on the stomach not directly on the horse’s back but on another vaulter’s head. “That turn itself is not very difficult, but stayed in people’s memory spectacularly”, says Helma Schwarzmann. 

Let’s wait what vaulters come up with at CHI AL SHAQAB 2015. And just enjoy it, but leave it to the judges to do the scoring.