From tragedy to triumph
After graduating from American Fork High School in 2005, Cambry Kaylor headed west to California to practice for the Equestrian National Vaulting Championships. For a week, she practiced hours upon hours, getting comfortable on a new horse with friends and teammates in Petaluma, Calif. On the final day, she and her teammate were practicing their pairs routine. Kaylor went for the dismount. Her partner didn’t. Her foot got caught under his chin and, thinking that it was caught on the horse, she over-rotated. Kaylor fell hard on her back, severing her spinal cord on impact and breaking her back at T10 and T11.
“Of course, it would happen that way,” Kaylor said. “On the last day.”
Kaylor wanted to be a vaulter after she and her sister, Makenna, saw an article in the “American Girl” magazine about a mother and daughter who competed in California. The two Kaylor girls ran to their mother, Kim, showing her the article, pleading for her to call and find a club near their home in Washington.
“The woman on the end of the line asked, ‘How far is Redmond [Washington] from you?'” said Kim Kaylor, laughing. “It was only 10 minutes away.”
It was only a matter of days before both girls were standing in front of the coach in Redmond and a few weeks before they were learning tricks on the back of a horse.
Equestrian vaulting is a mix of gymnastics and dance on the back of a moving horse with people in pairs or as teams of six. The sport is believed to be one of the oldest equestrian sports, dating all the way back to 1,000 years ago in Rome. It is still popular in Europe and was introduced to the United States in the 1960s, but is still relatively unknown, with only 100 active clubs.
The horse is controlled by a person in the middle of the arena guiding the animal on a long rein called a longe. Depending on the difficulty and level of the vaulter, the horse either walks, trots or canters as the athlete mounts, dismounts, jumps and even does a handstand on its back.
Between the ages of 8 and 18, Kaylor traveled all over the country competing and working toward a gold medal level — the highest in the sport. She won national championships in different team events where she was the flyer, the one who is tossed in the air. A couple of years before the accident, while living and training in California, she reached the silver medal level.
“She was totally fearless,” Kim Kaylor said. “She could never get enough of vaulting.”
When she woke up from the accident several days later in the trauma center in Santa Rosa, Calif., she asked to see the videos from the International Competition. She was eager to see how her friends and teammates had done.
She didn’t understand how severe her injury was for those first few days. It was just a broken back. She figured that she’d be back competing by the next year.
“All those feelings are blurry,” Kaylor admitted. “They don’t make much sense in my head, but I never thought it would be the end of my vaulting.”
After three weeks at the trauma center and then another three weeks at a spinal rehabilitation center in San Jose, Calif., Cambry was released just in time to cheer her teammates on at the National Championships in Denver.
“I never let myself think that vaulting was over for me,” she said.
A wheelchair wasn’t the way that she had imagined entering the arena in Denver that year, but she was happy just being around her team, vaulting and the horses. Her team changed their choreography, adding more “Cambry style” and dedicated it to Kaylor, sitting near by. She even rolled to the awards stands with them.
When she came back to Utah, she began assistant coaching with her club, Oak Hills, in Spanish Fork. A few months later and with Opal, a horse given to her by a friend, she branched off and started her own club, Technique Vaulting. Kaylor was concerned at first that parents might not want their children taking lessons from someone in a wheelchair. She wondered if parents would be worried about the risks of equestrian vaulting.
Ironically, her injury is the only serious injury to occur in the decades that the sport has kept records. There have been minor injuries like broken ankles or wrists, comparable to those in gymnastics. According to the American Vaulting Association, the sport is one of the safest of the equestrian disciplines because the horse is controlled by a longeur in the middle of the arena, not by the rider, and because the horses are trained under the association’s strict requirements.
Kaylor’s fears were unfounded. Her club continues to grow, and she currently teaches seven classes in three locations: Sandy, Lehi and Provo.
“Coaching really helped with the transition by being in vaulting but not being able to vault,” she said.
It was easier than she expected, too. She worried that she wouldn’t be able to show her students the techniques of vaulting. But she often gets out of her chair and shimmies onto a barrel, to help spot her students through tough moves or show them where to grip the handles. None of the 50 students seem to mind her wheelchair. The little kids ask her to get out of her chair so they can ride it around. They sit on her lap as she critiques the other students. They even sit against her legs to get a deeper stretch. And when the club goes to competitions, she brings a couple of her extra chairs and they have wheelchair races down the barn aisles to lighten the mood and take the pressure off of the athletes.
“When they are here long enough, the wheelchair becomes normal,” Kim Kaylor said.
In her four years as a coach, Kaylor has taken several athletes to the nationals competition. Many of them come back as national champions. Kailie Goodman, 17, who has been vaulting with Kaylor for all four years, said she thinks it is no coincidence.
“She’s constantly learning to teach us more so that we can chase our dreams,” Goodman said. “This is her passion.”
For more information on the Technique Vaulting Club, visit www.techniquevaulting.org.
