Equestrian Vaulting: The New York Times

Artigo no The New York Times

BACK in 2005, when Miranda Marcantuno was 5, she attended a 4-H show here with her mother. She went on a pony ride, and afterward the pony’s owner handed her a flier. On it was a picture of something Miranda had never seen before: a pretty young girl in a costume, posing, ballerinalike, on a horse. Miranda had to know more.
“I asked my mom,” she said, “and we found out what vaulting was” — essentially gymnastics on horseback. Miranda said that she knew right away that she wanted to be a vaulter. The only problem was, she had to be 6 to start training with her local team.
“So I put the flier in my sock drawer,” she said during a recent weekend workshop here, where the vaulters pirouetted, flipped and did handstands on cantering horses. Most were preadolescent girls in spandex outfits and ballet-type slippers made especially for the sport.
“When I woke up on my sixth birthday,” she continued, “I took it out and handed it to my mom.”
Miranda is now an 11-year-old fifth grader whose team, Vaulting Visions, is a national champion in the American Vaulting Association’s Copper Division for beginning canters. Along with her teammate Katie Gieschen, 19, she is vying for a spot on the coming season of “America’s Got Talent.” If they make it, they will perform lifts and upside-down dance moves atop a cantering horse on prime-time television.
And that, said Ms. Gieschen, who has been vaulting since age 2, will go a long way toward erasing the blank look she regularly encounters when explaining her sport to nonequestrian types.
Sheri Benjamin, the president of the vaulting association, which is based in California, said that vaulting in the East was still in a fledging state, but that its popularity was growing. “The East Coast is on a roll — now you can find a club pretty close, no matter where you are,” she said.
American vaulting has traditionally been thought of as a Western sport because that’s where it originated more than 40 years ago, she added. “A woman who ran a pony club in California went to Europe, where vaulting is huge, and brought it back here.”
Stephanie Siemens of Amherst, N.Y., a former association president who coached vaulting in Southern California in the 1980s and ’90s and who now sits on its grant committee, agreed that the sport was becoming more popular in the East.
“I know of a club in Rhinebeck and another one in Syracuse,” she said. “There’s one near Albany. They’re coming along.” She attributed the growth to Alison Gieschen, the mother of Katie and the coach of Vaulting Visions, who organized the workshop at Chapter One Farms here. “She’s a mover and a shaker,” Ms. Siemens added.
Though the association’s Web site, americanvaulting.org, lists only two clubs in New York and three in New Jersey, plenty of others are out there, Ms. Benjamin said.
“The A.V.A. runs all the competitive stuff,” including an annual national competition, to be held in July this year in Santa Barbara, Calif., she said. “We have 2,000 members, but I’m going to guess there are 5,000 vaulting clubs and organizations from coast to coast. If people want to find a club, all they have to do is call the main A.V.A. office, or even just call a local barn and say, ‘Why don’t you have vaulting?’ ”
Several vaulters predicted that those calls would increase after the United States hosts the World Equestrian Games for the first time, in Lexington, Ky., from Sept. 25 to Oct. 10. The event, which includes vaulting, will be televised by NBC.
“After that, it’s just going to explode on the East Coast,” Ms. Benjamin said. “We’ve already got momentum going, but vaulting is a sport that once people see it, they have to try it.”
Vaulting has been slower to take off in this area than in places where riding goes on year round, Ms. Siemens and others said. Vaulters around here usually have to wait until late March or April, when clubs can start practicing outdoors. The 12 members of Vaulting Visions, ages 10 to 19, practice three hours once a week in spring and twice a week in summer. (Competing members like Miranda Marcantuno and the younger Ms. Gieschen practice more.)

Because vaulting is essentially choreographed routines done on horseback, it mostly attracts young girls who may already know a few dance or gymnastics moves. But that training is not necessary for beginning vaulters, said Jennifer Williams, the association’s only judge based on the East Coast (there are 16 others) and coach of her own club, the Great Falls Vaulters of Boyds, Md.  

“Cross-training is a great help, but it’s not necessary,” said Ms. Williams, who attended the recent workshop and, like many of the adults congregated at the indoor training center, learned horse-training techniques from Yossi Martonovich, the father of a former vaulter, who is based in Golden, Colo., and has become the sport’s go-to expert for readying the animals for acrobatic routines.
“What do vaulters need to do to keep the horse happy?” asked Mr. Martonovich, 65, whose background is in classical dressage. “Harmony is especially important,” he said, motioning toward several attentive vaulters sitting nearby.
Unlike many equestrian sports, vaulting is not hugely expensive. Alison Gieschen charges her club members $80 a month for coaching and access to her four vaulting horses. Otherwise, members pay only their travel and competition fees, including costume costs. Ginger Klein, a workshop participant from Bear Gap, Pa., who is starting a club, said she planned to charge her members $30 a month.
“You don’t have to own your own horse” to vault, Ms. Benjamin said. “You share a horse or a couple of horses with your club, which keeps expenses down.” She added: “Barns that offer riding lessons will come to vaulting because they see it brings the younger kids in. They see the advantage that, maybe if I get involved in vaulting, they’ll also try Western riding later. And if they do, they’ll be safer on the horse.”
Advocates like Ms. Benjamin say that vaulting can actually be safer than many other activities, like soccer, in which injuries occur routinely. Vaulters don’t wear helmets because “it’s safe not to,” she said.
“The U.S. Pony Club and the Certified Horsemanship Association — two organizations that are safety zealots — promote vaulting without helmets, based on their own studies,” Ms. Benjamin continued. “If you want a reason why we don’t wear them, it’s because people don’t wear helmets when they do gymnastics. Vaulting involves gymnastics.”
Vaulting is also drawing the families of children with mental and physical disabilities. At Root Farm in Verona, N.Y., Pete Senn, the farm manager, and his wife, Kim, include vaulters with conditions like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder on their nine-member team, the Root Farm Vaulters, which competes in association events.
“We work with kids with Down syndrome, ADHD, cerebral palsy,” said Mr. Senn, who started coaching six years ago. “Over the years, I’d say 90 percent of the kids we’ve worked with are disabled.”
“What we’ve found is that when you put someone on the back of the horse, it gives them a sense of being in control,” he added. “And with vaulting, with everyone up on a horse, it levels the playing field. You get the feeling of being on a team.”

PEDRICKTOWN, N.J