SYDNEY, Australia (AP) _ Mothers of the world are going to be horrified.

Over and over, they tell their kids not to jump on beds and to stay off the neighbor's trampolines for fear the little ones will break their necks. And now look what happens.

Olympic medals are being given out for such disobedience.

Three-time world champion Irina Karavaeva of Russia won the first-ever gold medal Friday as trampoline made its Olympic debut. Oxana Tsyhuleva of Ukraine took the silver, and Karen Cockburn of Canada won the bronze.

Jennifer Parilla, the only American in the competition, finished ninth in the qualifications and didn't make it to the finals.

"A lot of people don't really know what trampoline is," Cockburn said. "They think it's a toy you play on in the backyard."

Well, yeah.

The trstopping flips 20-some-feet in the air.

"It's a viable sport with any other sport," said Judy Wills Cline, who won the first world championship in 1964. "This is much, much harder than it looks."

"They don't know us if they criticize us," Wills Cline insisted. "Just like a lot of people criticize table tennis and synchronized swimming."

And to be fair, the tricks the trampoline athletes do aren't easy or for the faint of heart.

"It's an adrenaline rush. I'm actually afraid of heights, which is really funny," Cockburn said. "But it's a different feeling on the trampoline."

Karavaeva looks almost like a diver as she flips and twists in the air. Only she doesn't have a big pool of water underneath her, just a springy piece of canvas and the floor.

She soared 25 feet in the air on some of her tricks, lightly touching down on the mat and popping back with catlike reflexes. Her routines were so skillful she looked as if she was floating through the air.

"She's doing the most difficulty I've ever seen," Parilla said. "She jumps very high and I think she needs to because the more difficulty there is, the more skill you need."

And at any minute, disaster is just waiting to happen. Anna Dogonadze of Germany led after the qualification round, but she got too far back on one of her tricks and actually bounced off the mat.

She wasn't hurt, landing on the end deck, the protective cushion behind the trampoline.

But unlike gymnastics, there is no starting over after a mistake, so Dogonadze's chance at a medal was gone. She scored a 5.00 out of a possible 40, and dropped all the way to eighth.

Parilla, at 19 the youngest competitor in trampoline, was out of the running much earlier. She botched the fourth skill in her optional routine, a new trick she put in to increase her difficulty level, and it dropped her score.

"It stayed low until the end, and I couldn't get it back up," she said. "I'm the youngest trampolinist here of the guys and girls. There are a lot of world champions here, people with experience. I'm sure that definitely helped. I'll be back in 2004, and I think I'll be better-prepared then."

Yes, folks, trampoline is here to stay. Supporters worked for 30 years to get the sport into the Olympics, and they're not about to go home now.

George Nissen, the co-inventor of the trampoline, even traveled to Sydney for the debut. The 86-year-old sat in one of the front rows, beaming as his creation got center stage in sport's biggest showcase.

"We used to say, Are we going to get it to the Olympics?"' he said. "And people would say it would be 2000 before that happens."

(Copyright 2000 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)