Altius

Alone in his torment, Mack boarded the first bus of the day for ANZ Stadium in Brisbane, Australia. It was September 7, 2001, the day of the pole vault final in the Goodwill Games. He had reached the city two weeks earlier, but he was hobbled by shooting pains that coursed up and down the outside of both legs. He had done little since arriving except try to quell the mutiny in his limbs. Cocooned in a headset that was playing electronic music whose repetitious beat nearly put him in a trance, Mack barely noticed the surroundings—the Brisbane River, Moreton Bay, the sky that soon would fill with unfamiliar stars.

Begun in the 1980s by American media mogul Ted Turner as an antidote to the boycott-plagued Olympics, the Goodwill Games bounced between East and West every four years until Time Warner bought them. In Australia, the goal was to capitalize on the sports fervor created by the Sydney Olympics a year earlier. It had already been announced before they began that 2001 would be the last of the Goodwill Games.

In Brisbane, the Games’ last hurrah on the international sports stage would be Mack’s first. Brisbane began in 1824 as a penal colony, one to which the most recalcitrant prisoners in Sydney were sent. It would be the place where Tim Mack’s economic bondage ended.

Pain was nothing new to Mack. It’s a constant in pole vaulting. Shoulder pain is caused by the stress of planting the pole and bending it like William Tell ready to core some apples. Leg pain is caused by the effects of the sprint to the box, and the jarring plant of the pole. Pole-vaulters often overwork the legs, particularly, because they are fierce competitors, driven athletes who think they can persevere, push through the curtain of pain, and find the skyway hidden behind it.

Still, Mack was hurt, he was alone, and he was close to broke.

Brisbane also can be a harsh place. One of the biggest land grabs in history took place in the Australian state of Queensland, with the white settlers displacing more than 100,000 Aborigines from over 200 tribes before the 20th century began. Historically, Queensland and its capital, Brisbane, have been havens for conservative, sometimes extremist, politics. Gun owners have inordinate influence.

Its image of a place red in tooth and claw was more than a little dated by the new millennium, but ANZ (for Australia-New Zealand) Stadium still was no place for someone not ready to give his all.

“It was really where I learned to compete,” Mack said. “It was one of the last meets of the season, and it tested everything about me: Could I get it together for one competition? Should I have tried to run instead of resting? Could I adequately prepare? Could I still vault without swinging on a pole or vaulting for two weeks? Could I get ready mentally?”

Mack knew he had no stress fracture and that nothing was torn that needed a surgical repair. But he had to manage the pain better. Ten days earlier, he couldn’t take two steps without wincing. Bemiller was back in the States. Mack had no one on whom to rely but himself.

“I didn’t come all that way not to jump,” Mack said. “I had massage and treatments, but I had to be careful. Therapists can overwhelm you and leave no time to calm it down. I used ice and massage. For a week to a week and a half, I’d ice three or four times a day for fifteen minutes each time. I used a frozen ice cup, running it up and down my legs. I took Aleve [an over-the-counter anti-inflammatory] twice a day.”

When he walked, it was delicately. He would do nothing rash. He wouldn’t jog. He would rest. Two days before the pole vault, he began stretching—still no running, still plenty of ice.

He was literally a stranger in a strange land. He knew few of the elite pole-vaulters well. Many of the men who had been at the World Championships in Edmonton that August were there. Russia’s Dmitri Markov, coming off a jump of 19–10¼ (6.05) in Alberta, the equal of the best anyone not named Sergey Bubka had ever done, was in the field. So was Aleksander Averbukh, an Israeli who had grown up in Siberia and was the reigning European indoor champion. Sydney gold medalist Nick Hysong and American record-holder Jeff Hartwig were also jumping. They had no reason to worry about Mack. Although he led qualifying at the Worlds earlier that summer, it meant nothing. It was only based on fewest misses. Mack had faded in the final and finished ninth at 18–10¼ (5.75).

For a man working part-time as a fitness trainer and who had a drawer full of sponsorship rejection letters and a bumblebee costume in his past, it was not good news. Only the top eight in track and field win payoffs.

“I was hitting my takeoff mark at 13 feet in Edmonton, and there were guys hitting it at 15 feet. Fifteen feet to 13 feet is a big difference in efficiency. I was dumbfounded. I didn’t have any more in me,” said Mack.

But when it seemed least likely, he would find a reserve in Brisbane he didn’t know he had. “I knew it was the last meet of the year, and that was one way of getting ahead,” he said. “By the end of the year, most guys are burned out and ready to throw it in. It was a challenge to me to see if I could get it together under those circumstances.”

When night fell, so did the temperature. To Mack, that meant jumping weather. “It was a cool night like a high school football night back in Ohio,” said Mack. “I don’t mind vaulting in the daytime, but I love it at night. I always loved jumping under the lights. It seems to make everything brighter, to define everything better. Athens was like that too, the lights shining down. There’s a peaceful air to that.”

He felt good in his warm-ups, which included skipping down the track. All athletes in the jumps skip as part of warm-ups. They seek horizontal length in the long jump and triple jump, height in the pole vault and high jump. “I was skipping harder and faster than normal, because I needed to shock my system. My nervous system hadn’t been firing for two weeks,” he said.

The goal was modest. He wanted to clear one or two bars, since everybody who clears a bar gets paid. He started at 17–8½ (5.40), with $2,000 the reward.

“I felt so much pressure at the beginning of the competition just to clear one bar. I went flying forward on the runway, and it wasn’t hurting at all,” Mack said in wonder. “I took a running jump off the ground, which is one of the things I had been working on all year.”

It had always been his weakness. “I am sure Tim would tell you,” Tim O’Hare said, when asked to scout his friend, “that he would like to get a better jump off the ground.”

In Brisbane, Mack braced for the howl of pain in his legs, but there was none.

“It was so surprising. I was ready for it to hurt. Instead, I felt really strong, like I hadn’t missed a beat. That was when I started feeling it,” said Mack.

Halfway through the meet, the jumpers who didn’t need it as much, the ones who hadn’t grubbed and scrounged for the wherewithal to keep jousting, began to fall by the wayside. In what was the biggest victory of his career prior to 2004, Mack won at 19–0¼ (5.80).

The metric number 5.80 is big in pole vaulting when translated into feet and inches, for it equates to 19 feet. The other “magic numbers” are six meters (19–8¼), 6.10 (20 feet) and, of course, Bubka’s record of 6.15 (20–2). To Mack, however, the magic number in Brisbane was 20,000—as in dollars. No longer would he moonlight in odd jobs. Soon, he would have an agent, Chris Layne, with Total Sports in Knoxville, and a Nike contract. The latter was modest by the standards of football or basketball, but only the elite of the elite get even that in the pole vault in the United States.

Mack knew he had to change to improve, and the Goodwill Games victory gave him the means to do that.

“It was huge without a doubt. The feeling was almost the same as it was after winning the Olympics. It was so big for me; I couldn’t believe it. It came to $15,000 after they took everything out. For me at that time, that was living expenses for a year,” he said.

While American competitors often attributed the Eastern Bloc dominance to state-sponsored use of anabolic steroids, that was only part of the story. The USSR and its satellites devoted more time, money and research to sports training than did the West. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, many great coaches and trainers went elsewhere to make their living. Romanian strength coach Tudor Bompa, a former Olympic rower, became a full professor at York University in Toronto. In 1963 Bompa had devised periodization training. When he immigrated to Canada, he became the Johnny Appleseed of the regimen, spreading the gospel of periodization to strength trainers across North America. Mack became one of his disciples.

“I had made periodization training the biggest part of my workouts in 2001,” Mack said. “I wanted to be ready at the end, and I made the Worlds and won the Goodwill Games.”

He e-mailed Bompa with the new computer his 19-foot jump in North Carolina the year before had convinced his mother to buy him. Mack also called Bompa on the phone. “I never cared where I had to go for help,” Mack said. The theory was new in the United States at the time. Periodization breaks training down into phases called preparation, competition, and transition. Recovery time is built in. It varies the time and intensity of workouts, both to sharpen the interest of the athlete and to target specific areas. Some qualities, such as explosive power and endurance, would be mutually exclusive if simultaneously developed. The theory is that by rousing the central nervous system to a fever pitch, greater gains can be made at specific “peak” times than by repetitive workouts to slab on sheer muscle mass. The ultimate goal was to be at the ceiling of Mack’s talent on the night of the Olympic final.

“Bompa convinced me to listen to my body,” Mack said. “If I had to slow down on paper, regardless of how my training was going, I did. You build yourself in the first half-cycle, then you reduce the amount of training so your body can super-compensate. You train really hard again, and your body super-compensates for that. You feel better, and you’re peaking at the right time.”

It is his attention to the recovery aspects of training that has made possible Mack’s longevity. Physiologically, he isn’t as old as the calendar insists. This is because of his lifestyle and because he doesn’t let training erode his body the way it did in 2000. With the view of peaking at the right time, Mack and his sports psychologist, Joe Whitney, devised a series of visualization exercises shortly after the 2000 Olympics. The idea was to use the power of Mack’s mind to put him there on the runway, under the stars, by the fire-light of the Olympic flame in Athens. “We worked on imagining what it would be like when I walked into the Olympic Stadium in Athens,” Mack said. “I thought he was crazy at first, frankly. I got to where I could close my eyes and see myself brushing by people I knew would be there. I could hear the sounds of the Greek music; I could smell the smells. When I actually did get there, it was no big deal.”

In his mind, he had seen himself taking his victory lap in Athens countless times before he actually made the run. “I wanted him to have a sense of not only the competitive environment but also of being in that environment and focusing on the cues he needed to perform,” said Whitney, who has been working with University of Tennessee athletes since 1998.

For simple imagery and visualization exercises, Whitney might spend only fifteen or twenty minutes with Mack. For serious talks when adversity strikes, the session might last ninety minutes.

“Most pole-vaulters’ cues are kinesthetic,” said Whitney. “It’s a rhythmic movement that leads into an explosive one. It’s also difficult because of the nature of the event. You wait, then perform; then wait and wait and perform again.”

At the highest level like the Olympics, the physical abilities of the pole-vaulters are very nearly equal. The difference between them becomes their mental acuity. “Tim has a great ability to play and focus. He is very accurate in assessing his strengths and weaknesses,” Whitney said.

Some of the visual imagery was done in what Mack calls “The Ork Room.” It is an area in one of Whitney’s two side-by-side offices in Stokely Athletics Complex on the Tennessee campus that contains an “Alpha chair.”

“It looks like a big, white egg, like Mork from Ork,” said Mack.

The chair is acoustically designed and, with its ovoid shape, looks like the makings of a giant’s breakfast. The athlete sits inside it, the lights are turned off, and his head is soon wrapped in surround sound. For from twelve to twenty minutes, the athlete listens to either music of his choice or to Whitney’s pre-recorded, personalized CDs. It’s like having Knute Rockne muttering in your ear about the Gipper.

“Music is an emotional primer,” Whitney said. “We practice getting to the emotional state we want the athlete in at the meet.”

Mack and Whitney had a past that went back to sessions in a tiny office Whitney occupied at the time. Mack would lie on the floor to do his visualizations because that was the only place where there was room.

“I saw him all the time in ’98 and ’99,” said Mack. “I wasn’t getting enough sleep. I was going out late. I was really going nowhere.” Whitney and Mack talked about the vision of what Mack wanted to do as a pole-vaulter. It was both specifically outcome-oriented (making the Olympics) and sweeping in conceptual scope. Mack wanted to master the event as much as is humanly possible.

“We took a good look at what was taking him away from that,” said Whitney. “We looked at his running, sleeping, eating. He absolutely committed to the lifestyle of an Olympic athlete, and that led to a lot of physical changes.”

For Mack, it was almost like undergoing a purification ritual. He stripped his life of adornments until it was almost as bare as the scalp gleaming under the barber’s shears he turned on himself. He purged himself of distractions, scoured away creature comforts, and confronted the naked truth that he would never clear a bar fixed against the very sky unless he changed. For additional inspiration, Mack used his new computer to set up an e-mail address that was both promise and challenge, a goad that would urge him on every time he logged onto his Internet server.

“I needed something for Athens,” he said. “Obviously, I wanted to get the gold. At that time, I was a Top Twenty vaulter in the world, so I needed something to remind myself of where I wanted to go.”

Thus was born the AOL username “Goldnathens.”

“I kept it to myself, because I wondered what people would think,” Mack said. “When I revealed it, some people didn’t figure it out for a while. They thought it meant ‘Golden Athens.’ I was always taping things to mirrors, inspirational sayings. I’d bet a lot of people never thought I really would be Goldnathens.”

There’s in Mack something of Midwestern modesty and an “aw, shucks” sensibility. He contains his emotions and doesn’t let on that there might be a surprise inside the package. In these years, he mapped out the course he was to follow. It fulfilled his deep need for a controlled environment. “I didn’t like going to practice and not knowing what I was going to do,” Mack said. “So the practice plans went from a couple of pages to over thirty.”

“He set up this program for himself, and he would walk around like a robot,” Russ Johnson said. “When he set up Goldnathens, he told me, ‘There’s no doubt.’ He was so pissed about the 2000 Trials, and he was not going to let that happen again.”

“I worked on my mental approach too,” Mack said. “I was totally engulfed in it. My focus was totally on myself, and I didn’t have time for anyone else. I laid out my training program in big twelve-week cycles and posted them in the apartment—twelve weeks for indoor season, twelve weeks for outdoor.”

“Three years out, he was so focused on the next Olympics, it was amazing,” said Russ Johnson. “We would be talking, and he would look down at his watch and say abruptly: ‘I’ve got to go to bed.’ He had a checklist on the wall. Did he drink enough water today? Did he lift? Did he stretch? Did he get his protein? How many guys were doing that three years out?”

Said Whitney: “One of the problems with the lifestyle of an Olympic athlete is that it is not the same lifestyle as your buddies who work in a bank.”

Mack would go to bed by 11 P.M. If his roommates were playing computer games or watching DVDs, he would come in and turn the volume down. He was dedicated to it and consumed by it. It represented a totality of commitment no athletes except Olympians experience.

How much is a gold medal worth? Three years without ordinary pleasures and everyday living. Three years with denial and asceticism. Three years that fell short of a biblical prophet’s mortification in the desert but not much else. “I cannot tell you how many repetitions I have done when I never even picked up a pole,” said Mack. “I would visualize myself going through a jump, and my arms would twitch, and my brain would tell my body to do things, and I’d be moving my arms. I was doing it without physically doing it.”

He worked out two or three times a week for two or three hours at a time. He would only make ten to fifteen jumps per week, but he would lift three times each week. He worked with plyometrics, threw the medicine ball, took cold baths, and worked on gymnastics. It was absolute drudgery. Even when he had other jobs, he put himself through the same routine.

In one drill, he would walk into Stokely, the University of Tennessee’s old basketball facility and current site of the indoor track facility. He would run, drop the pole, plant it, and visualize himself soaring over the bar. He did three sets—thirty times, then twenty times, then ten. Unsatisfactory visualization meant he had to start over.

“I’d be the only one in the place,” Mack said. “You look around, and it’s just you.”

He had to be deathly sick to miss practice. With more money, he began eating better and consequently wasn’t sick as often. He worked hard to build up his “core”—the torso muscles from the shoulders to the waist, the “abs” (stomach muscles), the obliques (side abdominals), the “lats” (principally the lattisimus dorsi, the large flat muscle in the back that works during arm movement), the “pecs” (chest muscles), and the “glutes” (buttocks, hips, thighs).

“You need a strong base, a good platform,” Bemiller said. “The back takes so much of the shock of pole vaulting; the abs are critical to keep the legs up.”

Doubt became his enemy as much as injury had been. “I would wonder if any of this was ever going to help,” he said. “I knew what the European jumpers were doing. A lot of them have their coaches with them all the time. I knew I had to compete with them. I had to do everything they did and more. Everything I was doing definitely did not assure me of anything. But I definitely knew if I didn’t do it, I was never going to get there.”

He would go to the outdoor track at 10 A.M. “It was the same thing as at Stokely. You’re the only one there,” Mack said. “No one else is out.”

Russ Buller, LoJo and Jim Davis, who would all compete in the 2004 Trials, were training together in Knoxville. Mack trained alone. “I don’t think I resented it, but it was a distraction,” he said. “I trusted what I was doing rather than try to go with those guys. I thought that if I went, I’d have somebody do my training for me.”

Bemiller knew about the training, but he couldn’t be there often.

“The gratification all had to be internal,” Mack said. “You didn’t get the feedback from anyone else of running a better time or making a better jump. You think to yourself: ‘That one felt good.’ But you were only accountable to yourself. Since I couldn’t see it from the outside, I had to feel it inside. That helped me make adjustments. If ‘B’ was in the stands, that was just an extra.”

Mack coached high school boys and girls until the Olympic year of 2004. The coaching, however, was customized somewhat to the needs of one Timothy Steven Mack. He has coached three boys and a girl who went on to win state championships in Tennessee. In the old days, he charged $20 per hour, and the price would drop to $15 each if he had three vaulters.

“I used them as unwitting little guinea pigs,” Mack admitted. “If there was something I was working on, I’d have them do it too. Little did they know, but they were helping me too.”

At the end of 2001, he was ranked fifth in the USA by Track and Field News. After winning the 2002 U.S. Indoor at 18–9¼ (5.72) in the Armory in the Bronx, the meet where he met Grace Upshaw, he finished second in the USA Outdoors. He was ranked second in the USA and fifth in the world.

He became a mimic, watching tape of Bubka and 1992 Olympic gold medalist Maksim Tarasov, who had also jumped 19–10¼ (6.05). “It was just little pieces over time,” Mack said. “I had watched the tape over and over again from the Worlds in Edmonton. If you look at my vault from then to now, it’s completely different. I knew what was wrong, and I knew people who did it better, so I looked to them to fix it.”

The next year was critical. The USOC distributes money to athletes who meet Olympic “A” (automatic approval) and “B” (conditional approval) qualifying standards. But in 2003 Mack would gamble with his newfound and hard-won financial solvency, risking the additional Nike stipend he got as a Top Ten jumper in the world rankings. There were technical changes that simply had to be implemented and mastered.

“I knew I was going to take a step back, because I had to change some things,” said Mack. “I was working on pole drops, on leg strength and technique, on foot placement. When my foot hit, I was getting too much back kick.”

The term “back kick” describes the pole-vaulter’s carrying his leg through and almost giving himself a literal kick in the buttocks. It can be caused by poor running mechanics, such as lack of knee lift, too short a stride, or by carrying too heavy a pole. The cure for it is maintaining an upright posture when approaching top speeds.

Mack would go winless in 2003, with a best jump of 18–10¾ (5.76). It was like Tiger Woods changing the swing that had won the 1997 Masters by a record twelve shots, suffering through the transition the next year and then emerging with something smooth enough to pour over hotcakes yet still powerful enough to wallop most golf courses into obsolescence.

“The big thing was to stay in the Top Ten,” Mack said. “If I didn’t, my Nike stipend would be cut. I was petering around at seven, eight, nine, keeping my head above water in the IAAF rankings. I was sixth at the Worlds out of thirty-two guys, and every jump felt horrible. I was leaning forward when I ran, but I was still hanging in there. To be struggling with my technique and still be able to hang in was a big thing.”

When the final rankings came out, he was tenth in the world and third in the USA.

“That was it!” Mack said. “That was a major step. I had worked on a lot of stuff. I had struggled. I had taken the hit, and I had made it. That was like a green light.”

In a way, Mack was part of a venerable American tradition during those years, that of the lone tinkerer, the solitary man on a quest. One of the sayings he had taped up was a quote from Bob Richards: “Ingenuity plus courage plus work equals miracles.”

“I try to live by that,” Mack said.

In early 2004 he took a bike tire weighted with sand and dangled it from the pole when he ran. That was to build strength. He devised a sled with which he could run then went to a welder’s shop in Knoxville and got him to make it. That was for better posture in running.

He had always been a meticulous record keeper. The so-called “Book,” which would give him a reputation as a distinguished scholar of what Bubka called the “Professor’s Sport,” grew out of his practice of keeping strict accounts. It wasn’t really groundbreaking. Edwin Moses, a physics major in college, had used a meticulous, scientific study of the technique of the 400-meter hurdles to become the best in the world in the 1970s and ’80s. Mack’s “Book” was more like a precise survey of the ground he had covered and a careful log of the implements he had used. Some observers thought it was magical, fashioning miracles out of the thin air. But it was based on empirical results and not mystical vibes. There was no abracadabra to it. It was simply assembling and organizing the variables, such as the pole’s length, its weight and flexibility, the height of the grip on it, the standards setting, the placement of the marks and the conditions.

“I kept track of Tim and his progress. In the first quarter of the 2004 season, I went to a party with my wife, and when I came back, my mind was racing,” said Russ Johnson. “I e-mailed Tim that night.”

Russ asked his old roommate and avid golfer if he ever wondered why he could hit eighty balls straight down the middle at the driving range in two hours’ practice, boomers going nearly 300 yards, and then the next day, he couldn’t.

Mack’s PR (19–2¼, or 5.85) was in 2002 at Bubka’s meet in Donetsk in the Ukraine. “Can you tell me what you ate for breakfast that day?” asked Russ Johnson. “What was your philosophy for that meet? Were you aggressive or passive? Were you aware of what was going on around you or not?”

“Most pole-vaulters,” Johnson said, “might remember only one or two things, like where the standards were on a big jump or what pole they were on then. If they remember one or two variables, that’s good.”

With tendency tracking, Mack and Johnson set out to do better.

“In a long workout, if I kept track, I’d probably jump better,” Johnson said. “There might be ten variables that are not important. The longer you track tendencies, the more you can narrow them down. You can tell yourself you don’t need to focus on this one. The pole vault is hard enough to understand anyway. Often, the only person who can understand what you’re talking about is another pole-vaulter.”

The idea was for Mack simply to trust the numbers that had proven successful over the course of his long years of experimenting.

“Say you come down to your third attempt at 19 feet,” Johnson said. “You turn to the chart and see where you stood to start the run for 19 feet, where you needed to grip the pole, the depth of the standards, which pole you needed to be on. When everything was going crazy around you, the idea was you just trusted the numbers and went on autopilot.”

In its own way, “The Book” was an expression of the mathematical elegance of the event, just as Georges Seurat’s painstaking, luminous pointillism was a breakthrough in art. Systems don’t have to be soulless, when they let a man fly. Seurat, like Mack, used analytical precision to systematize his discipline. Opposing hues on the color wheel, such as orange and blue, if juxtaposed, will both be strengthened and intensified when viewed by the human eye. Pole vaulting itself is a balance of polarities—the rugged individualism of solitary tinkering and the support group vital to success; the daring of Icarus and the shields and parachutes to provide a safe landing. For his part, Mack was juggling a number of opposites: brains and brawn, work and rest, past and prelude. The aim was for each element to buttress the other, for the whole to blend into what painting calls masterpieces and pole vaulting calls infinity and beyond as defined by six meters. What began as a sheet of paper became an entire notebook. It attained a reputation as the Rosetta Stone of pole vaulting.

Mack numbered his poles and then trusted the numbers. “Not doing this cost me two SEC championships by making stupid decisions,” Russ Johnson said. “I should have stayed on the pole I was on instead of reacting to other people. Lawrence Johnson always told me not to watch anybody else, so you wouldn’t be affected by what they do. Tim never watches the other jumpers. He can tell if a jump is good or bad from the way the crowd reacts.”

Said Mack: “It was designed for calm conditions. If there’s a tailwind or headwind, I make small adjustments. I switch to either a stiffer or a smaller pole. It was appropriate that Russ is from Augusta, Georgia [where the Masters is held]. The golf analogy was very appropriate. I might hit my 8-iron 150 yards with the wind dead, but if it’s in my face, I might need a hard 8 or even a light 7. I might think about what I did two years ago, when I made a three on this hole instead of a five last year. I’m not really very good at math, but it gave me information I could trust during a meet.”

It was a perfect system for Mack, who could concentrate beyond most limits of human weakness, who was not a “natural,” and whose development was the result of hours of practice and minute observation. Then, at the Prefontaine Classic, held only three weeks before the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials, it almost all turned to gibberish.

The Prefontaine Classic was named after the late Steve Prefontaine, one of the great figures in American track. Prefontaine at one time held all of the American distance running records. He ran with ferocity. He was seemingly determined to break himself and win no medal at all rather than compromise the totality of his commitment to go gold. He was small, seemingly composed of one part flying hair, one part thick mustache, three parts heart, lungs and astonishing cardiovascular system, and all the other parts pure will. “Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it,” he once said. His method was balls-out on the track, and his lifestyle was the exact same off it. He died at the age of twenty-four in a car crash after a party at which he had been drinking alcohol.

“You always want to do well at the Pre,” Mack said. “You can feel his spirit when you step on the track. You know how great he was, how his life was cut short.”

Mack finished ninth at the Pre. He cleared only one bar at 18–0½ (5.50). “I didn’t understand it,” said Mack. “I had gotten last place, but I knew I was on my way. I was getting over the crossbar by so much, it should have come. I was telling my parents all year, ‘It’s there. I’ve never felt this good in my life.’ But I wasn’t clearing the heights.”

After the Prefontaine meet, he had received the implement that would help him scrape the sky: a specially designed pole made by UCS Spirit that was stiffer than a morgue. It was hand-delivered to him by Steve Chappell of the Carson City, Nevada–based company. Mack would call it the “Big Stick. The original, which he did not use in Athens, was either stolen or misplaced in the hubbub after he won the gold medal. He used an exact duplicate to jump 6.01 meters (19–8½) later in the season.

Bemiller had flown out for the meet, as had his agent, Chris Layne. It was the first meet “B” had traveled to outdoors. “Flying all the way across the country to get your ass kicked will increase the frustration level,” Bemiller dryly noted.

At the airport, tempers flared. Ties fostered over long years between coach and pole-vaulter were fraying. Time was running out on Mack’s three-year plan. “It was a heated discussion,” said Bemiller. “I was embarrassed that it happened in front of his agent.”

Heads spun in the departure lounge as Mack and “B” argued. It was, it turned out, a problem with the arcane language of the pole vault.

“We had gone through the spring,” said Bemiller. “He was doing a lot right. He was getting a lot of air on the bars, but he was still coming down on them. He was gripping higher and running faster, but he still was hitting the bars. It was a new place, a new territory, and Mack had never been there before. We had to get it straightened out. This had been going on for three meets. He would either be two feet over the bar and come down on it or he’d be under it.”

“Go harder,” Bemiller would say.

“I’m doing what you told me!” Mack would flare back.

In person, Bemiller had gotten a feel for the dynamics and momentum that simply couldn’t be gleaned from watching videotape. Mack was swinging harder with his shoulders but that wasn’t raising his center of gravity fast enough. Bemiller wanted him to get upside-down as quickly as possible, using his hips and his pop-the-whip trail leg.

“If you swing your trail leg to the top, your hips and your other leg will follow,” Bemiller said. “He was trying to do it with his shoulders.”

The emphasis on the trail leg would also supply momentum up and into the pit. Continuing the momentum is a critical component of jumping high. Doing so moves the center of gravity as fast and as high as possible.

“I think it simplified the vault into a more continuous movement,” Bemiller said. “I could see the frustration, so I tried to simplify the vault in his mind. Trying to do too much is detrimental to execution, because there is not that much time to think. The athlete just has to react in the air.”

Instead of “swing hard,” Bemiller’s cue to Mack became “swing fast.”

“It sounds simple,” said Bemiller, “but it cleaned out the clutter.”

The pitch of the argument convinced coach and athlete that both were passionate about getting it straight. The light that teachers look for in their pupils’ eyes came on.

“I thought, ‘It’s over now,’” Mack said. “We were on the same page after all. It was like pouring gas on a fire, like pushing a snowball off the edge and watching it roll downhill. It was the breakthrough.”

In the jumps that were to come, the ones that would put him in the history and record books, he would move up very, very fast, working his arms early. Improving his run and plant, bettering his takeoff position, allowing him to use a swing that was faster and more effective—all of this would soon make Mack go up like a man knocking on heaven’s door. “Every piece of the puzzle, for me, is critical,” Mack said.

The puzzle had become a mosaic.

Bemiller thought Mack had reached the point where he had developed a good balance of all factors—height, runway speed, and swing speed. He was now a very efficient jumper.

“My old football coach said you can’t expect the ponies to beat the thoroughbreds all the time, but once in a while you get a pony that doesn’t know any better,” said Bemiller. “It was a joy to keep challenging Tim to improve, because he is not the fastest, tallest prodigy around, but he accepts the challenge of figuring out how to get better when others have dismissed his chances. He made himself into a world-class athlete, but he was hardly the perfect storm of factors aligning like Bubka. Tim’s journey was very impressive and very important to me.”

Next, they put the last piece of the mosaic in place.

“We decided to move the standards to 50–60 centimeters [a range between 1 foot–7¾ inches and 1–11½], so he wouldn’t work so hard getting to the bar,” Bemiller said. “Usually we want the standards as deep as possible, because it’s safer and you can be more aggressive off the ground.”

That night, Mack called his parents. In exactly twenty-two days, the U.S. pole vault team that would go to Athens would be chosen in Sacramento at the track and field trials.

“I will win the Olympic Trials,” Mack told them.