Aliya and the Amanar -- a reflection after an injury

Boy managed to adhere to the script, but with Mustafina, we got catastrophe. The women's all-around final had been underway for all of five minutes when the World champion landed her Amanar vault just a tad short, and her left knee turned inward. She winced as her knee involuntarily curled toward her torso, but stayed on her feet and finished the vault. 

 

It is the last one she'll do for awhile. Mustafina dodged a bullet by only tearing her miniscus, an injury that often requires surgery but is not considered career-ending. Bridget Sloan tore her miniscus in March of 2008 and made the Olympic team in July. Still, so public an injury resulting from a 2.5 twisting Yurchenko makes one understand why we see it so rarely.

 

"Everybody knows that you only have so many of those vaults in you," said International Gymnast Magazine publisher Paul Ziert, who watched and cringed from the press gallery. The Amanar -- a Yurchenko with 2.5 twists named after the great Romanian vaulter Simona Amanar. Amanar herself performed it once in major competition and retired immediately afterward. More than a decade later, the Amanar vault has still been landed by fewer than 25 women. It is considered the hardest vault done in women's gymnastics aside from the Cheng, which has been done by an even smaller handful.

 

And it should be done with caution. Mustafina's injury might give pause to her teammate Tatiana Nabieva, who now has a good chance of winning the vault title in tomorrow's event final. Nabieva's Amanar is wilder than Mustafina's -- she has not landed one in competition since the 2010 Worlds and her training attempts are nothing short of cringeworthy for those fond of their knees.

 

Ziert noted also that repeated landing of the Amanar tends to weaken the knees, causing stress that builds up and can result in greater potential for injury down the road. Ziert knows from personal experience -- in 1985, his star pupil Bart Conner tore his ACL performing a firaly simple move at an exhibition. The doctor told Ziert and Conner not to beat themselves up about how it happened, since Conner's knee had likely been worn down from years of hard landings.

 

When Shawn Johnson suffered a partial ACL tear early last year, she was skiing, an activity that's hard on the knees but probably not so much as landing Amanars. The conclusion one could vault to here is that Johnson's knees had been weakened by the pounding of gymnastics and the injury was at least in part because of it.

 

The loss of Mustafina -- whether it's for a few months or even (gulp) indefinitely is very bad for gymnastics, especially under this code. Excepting a small number of athletes -- the artistic Anna Dementyeva, Ksenia Afanasyeva, Ana Porgras and perhaps Viktoria Komova, without Mustafina's elegance and grace, the difficulty of this code of points and what all that gymnasts have to do to achieve high scores becomes appallingly evident. 

 

Without Mustafina, women's gymnastics seems in danger -- for the next year and a half, anyway -- of being a sport where women do trick after trick "like circus acrobats," Ziert said with more than a hint of disdain.

 

For the vault that has put a kink in what was already a very beautiful career, Aliya Mustafina received a 15.375. "It was a beautiful vault," someone said to me after the meet. She received the highest score of the competition, matched only by Switzerland's Giulia Steingruber, who stuck her own vault, a layout Rudi.