00:00As she tumbled, her hands missed the vault entirely, sending her hurtling through the air uncontrollably until she slammed into
00:07the ground.
00:08The other athletes watched on in shock as the Olympic vaulting horse claimed yet another victim.
00:13The apparatus had been cursed from the beginning of the Sydney Games, with an unprecedented number of mistakes, falls and
00:20injuries all the way from the preliminaries right up to the finals.
00:23It was strange, because the vault they were using at the 2000 Olympics wasn't any different to the one four
00:29years earlier at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
00:32Same height, same design.
00:34Yet for some reason, the greatest gymnasts in the world were suddenly struggling.
00:38Way high on the horse there.
00:40But when the gymnasts in the third rotation started their warm-up, that's when 16-year-old Alana Slater from
00:46Australia started noticing something didn't feel quite right.
00:50She felt like the vault was set too low.
00:52She mentioned it to the other competitors, but they all brushed her off.
00:56So she mentioned it to her coach.
00:57Her coach agreed, and they asked the equipment crew to check it.
01:01The crew opened up their apparatus norms booklet.
01:03They turned to page 42 and checked the height on the diagram, 120 centimeters.
01:08They checked the height of the vaulting horse.
01:10It was set at 120 centimeters.
01:13It didn't seem like anything was wrong.
01:15That was until Jackie Fy, the president of the Women's Technical Committee, had a closer look.
01:20And when she did, her heart sank.
01:22She knew immediately exactly what had gone terribly wrong.
01:26And it all stemmed from a printing mistake.
01:28See, in the previous Olympics, the vault was set at 120 centimeters.
01:33However, just two years later, in 1998, the International Gymnastics Federation increased the official vault height to 125 centimeters.
01:41But when they released their official apparatus norms booklet in 2000, ready for the Sydney Olympics, the booklet still had
01:49the old measurements listed for the women's vault.
01:51They realized their mistake five months before the Olympics, and Jackie Fy had issued a correction.
01:57But evidently, an uncorrected version of the booklet had ended up in the equipment crew's hands.
02:02Suddenly, everything started to make sense.
02:05She completely misses the front of the horse way high on the horse there.
02:09Jackie told the equipment crew to raise the vault to its correct height.
02:13But the damage had already been done.
02:1518 athletes had already vaulted at the incorrect height.
02:19Now, we're talking about the change in the feel of something that these gymnasts have done thousands of times.
02:24The U.S. national champion, Elise Ray, had already been dropped from medal contention down to 35th place after nearly
02:31breaking her neck on her first fall.
02:33The 18 athletes were offered the opportunity to vault again at the correct height.
02:38But it didn't change much in the results.
02:40They'd already been injured and well and truly shaken by the dangerous mistake.
02:45Andrea Radekin from Romania initially won the all-around event.
02:48But after failing a drug test four days later, after testing positive for the pseudoephedrine in her cough syrup,
02:54the gold medal ended up going to the Romanian in second place.
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