00:00As she tumbled, her hands missed the vault entirely, sending her hurtling through the air
00:04uncontrollably until she slammed into the ground. The other athletes watched on in shock as the
00:10Olympic vaulting horse claimed yet another victim. The apparatus had been cursed from the beginning
00:16of the Sydney Games, with an unprecedented number of mistakes, falls and injuries all the way from
00:21the preliminaries right up to the finals. It was strange because the vault they were using at the
00:262000 Olympics wasn't any different to the one four years earlier at the 1996 Atlanta
00:31Games. Same height, same design. Yet for some reason, the greatest gymnasts in the world were
00:37suddenly 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
00:45old Alana Slater from Australia started noticing something didn't feel quite right. She felt
00:51like the vault was set too low. She mentioned it to the other competitors, but they all brushed
00:55her off. So she mentioned it to her coach. Her coach agreed, and they asked the equipment
00:59crew to check it. The crew opened up their apparatus norms booklet. They turned to page
01:0442 and checked the height on the diagram. 120cm. They checked the height of the vaulting horse.
01:10It was set at 120cm. It didn't seem like anything was wrong. That was until Jackie Fye, the president
01:17of the Women's Technical Committee, had a closer look. And when she did, her heart sank. She knew immediately
01:23exactly what had gone terribly wrong. And it all stemmed from a printing mistake. See, in the
01:29previous Olympics, the vault was set at 120cm. However, just two years later, in 1998, the
01:36International Gymnastics Federation increased the official vault height to 125cm. But when
01:42they released their official apparatus norms booklet in 2000, ready for the Sydney Olympics,
01:47the booklet still had the old measurements listed for the women's vault. They realized their mistake
01:52five months before the Olympics, and Jackie Fye had issued a correction. But evidently, an uncorrected
01:59version of the booklet had ended up in the equipment crew's hands. Suddenly, everything started to make
02:04sense. She completely misses the front of the horse. Way high on the horse there. Jackie told the equipment
02:11crew to raise the vault to its correct height. But the damage had already been done. 18 athletes had already
02:17vaulted at the incorrect height. Now we're talking about the change in the feel of something that
02:22these gymnasts have done thousands of times. The US national champion, Elise Ray, had already been
02:27dropped from medal contention down to 35th place after nearly breaking her neck on her first fall.
02:34The 18 athletes were offered the opportunity to vault again at the correct height. But it didn't
02:39change much in the results. They'd already been injured and well and truly shaken by the dangerous mistake.
02:44Andrea Radican from Romania initially won the all-around event. But after failing a drug test four days
02:50later, after testing positive for the pseudoephedrine in her cough syrup, the gold medal ended up going to
02:56the Romanian Sloan Picture-View
02:57the Romanian in second place.
02:57Thanks for listening.
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