- The sport of
gymnastics has come a long way in the past 70 years. - Comparing the first gold-medal winning vault to Simone Biles, the two look nothing alike.
- In the early days of the vault, a clean jump was good enough for gold.
Star quarterbacks smoked cigarettes at halftime, the three-point line didn't exist, and Olympic high-jumpers hadn't figured out the right way to jump high.
Times have changed.
If athletes from today's world were transported back in time to compete against the best of yesteryear, they would be champions as long as they weren't accused of witchcraft first.
Few sports make this truth as apparent as the women's vault.
On its surface, the event is a simple one: approach the vault, jump, land clean. But in the years since the first gold medal was awarded in the 1950s, things have drastically changed.
The earliest vaults at the Olympics valued form over flips.
The first individual medals for women's vault were awarded at the 1952 Summer Games in Helsinki, with Ekaterina Kalinchuk of the Soviet Union taking gold.
Four years later, her fellow countrywoman Larisa Latynina would win gold with this vault.
Thanks to her background in ballet, Latynina showed unmatched grace across events, helping her become the most decorated Olympian of all time with 18 medals across three Olympic Games - a record that stood until Michael Phelps splashed it away with his historic run of podiums.
While she was the greatest of her time, it's clear from her vault that the limits of the event were not yet being explored, let alone pushed into the realm of fantasy.
Twelve years later, at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, Vera Caslavska of Czechoslovakia won her second straight gold with this vault.
Again, Caslavska's jump looks entirely pedestrian compared to the Olympic vaulters of today, but its simplicity is deceptive.
In a simple jump, the smallest imprecisions are magnified, and in a sport judged on form, Caslavska's vault is close to perfect.
Moving into the '80s and '90s, the vault as we recognize it today began to take shape.
At the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Henrietta Onodi of Hungary won her share of gold with these two incredible vaults.
Onodi's vaults give a good example of how those at the top of the sport pushed it into the future.
Simone Biles is an athlete all her own.
At the 2016 Summer Games, Simone Biles announced herself to the world as one of the most dominant athletes in all sports.
Biles' mastery is shown throughout the gymnastics program, but she sets herself apart on the vault.
This was her in 2016.
And in 2020, she's pushing the sport even further. Biles' arsenal of vaults is so incredible that judges essentially have to grade her on a curve.
In the lead-up to the 2020 Olympics, Biles landed a Yurchenko double pike, a move so difficult it had never been attempted before in competition.
Biles nailed it.
-#TokyoOlympics (@NBCOlympics) May 23, 2021
Looking at Biles, it's difficult to believe she is competing in the same event that Larisa Latynina won gold in nearly 70 years ago.
The sport has come quite a long way.