Category: Books

Tsukahara Mitsuo opens his autobiography not with triumph but with catastrophe. Rather than beginning with his eponymous vault or the dismount that made him famous, or with any of his five Olympic gold medals, he begins in February 1980, when he sustained a cervical spine injury, which effectively ended his bid for a fourth consecutive Olympic Games.

The excerpt translated here follows him through the accident itself, the frustrating weeks of rehabilitation, his increasingly desperate attempt to recover in time for Japan’s Olympic trials, and the painful realization that his competitive career had come to an end. They also reveal a personality familiar from the earlier chapters of this autobiography: a gymnast whose greatest strength was often indistinguishable from his greatest weakness. Again and again, he acknowledges that his determination to finish routines no matter the circumstances and his willingness to accept risks others would avoid had become both the source of his success and the cause of his injuries.

One aspect of the accident is worth noting. The skill that caused Tsukahara’s injury was a roll-out skill: an Arabian 1¾. Only months later, Elena Mukhina would be paralyzed attempting a more difficult version of the skill. Roll-out skills have since been banned from FIG competition.

The excerpt below is Tsukahara’s account of how that ending unfolded.

Coaches and gymnasts rarely leave detailed accounts of the failed attempts, incremental breakthroughs, and training methods that transform an idea into an eponymous skill. As a result, the origins of even the sport’s most famous elements are often reduced to little more than a date and the name of a competition.

This excerpt from Tsukahara Mitsuo’s autobiography is a rare exception. He takes the reader through the entire process of learning the Moon Salto (i.e., a half-in, half-out): discovering an unfamiliar trampoline skill, adapting it for high bar, devising progressions, repeating elementary drills hundreds of times, confronting crippling fear, and gradually convincing himself that the impossible might actually be possible.

Along the way, Tsukahara shares memorable anecdotes that illuminate how gymnasts trained before modern training methods became commonplace. He explains, for example, that he first practiced a double back dismount from the horizontal bar not in a gymnasium, but by landing in an outdoor sandpit, which resulted in a gash on his face. Later, while working toward the Moon Salto, he waited until everyone else had left the gym before attempting it, preferring to work on the skill with complete focus.

More than half a century later, the Moon Salto is rarely performed in men’s gymnastics and now carries a modest C rating. Yet its significance extends far beyond its current difficulty value. It opened the door to an entirely new family of skills, and before long, gymnasts were taking full-twisting double back somersaults to events such as floor exercise and still rings. Gymnastics advances by building on the innovations of one’s predecessors. I hope you enjoy Tsukahara’s story.