The Birdman

The plane droned over what used to be Mother Russia, as it took the world’s best pole-vaulters on the final leg of their annual pilgrimage to Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. They sat in their seats with their teeth chattering and their breath frosting in the chilled air. Because there was no baggage compartment, their poles were stacked as high as the seat backs in the center aisle. American record-holder Jeff Hartwig was perched atop them. He is a free spirit who lives in a house with a basement containing 145 snakes—primarily pythons and boa constrictors—plus a copperhead rattlesnake, two iguanas, five turtles, two alligators, and a monitor lizard. Perhaps Hartwig, the American record-holder both indoors and outdoors, was simply trying to channel the spirit of a cat, the better to land on all fours in the event of an emergency landing on the frozen steppes.

“When I saw the photo of Hartwig on top of those poles in the aisle, I almost fainted dead away,” said Tim Mack’s mother.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has gone into the dustbin of history. The men who aim themselves for the stars come back every February now to Ukraine. They come to Donetsk: the home of Sergey Bubka. In Donetsk, Bubka’s startling physical talent combined with the Soviet Union’s state-supported athletic system to create the greatest pole-vaulter ever. He nearly flew forever.

“It is a hard-core mining town,” said Mack. “It’s like what you think Eastern Bloc cities are like—snow, everything else brown or gray, the river frozen.”

“The amazing thing about the Soviet Union,” Mack continued, “is how primitive their training was. Bubka would run stadium steps with a fourteen-pound weight on his back. Instead of a modern pit, they would use mattresses. Instead of medicine balls, bags full of pebbles.”

“The conditions developed strong character,” Bubka said. “If you have everything, a beautiful environment, you are not hungry for success. In some ways, this determines what happens but not as much as the value of the success and the dream to the athlete.”

When Bubka was four years old, his mother fished him, as he was turning blue, out of the barrel in which she soaked cabbages. The year before, he tried to run away from home in the Soviet city of Voroshilovgrad (now Lugansk in Ukraine). On another occasion, the timely intrusion of a cherry tree branch snagged the boy’s pants as he fell like a blossom that had just budded. If a track coach had recruited his school, Bubka, busy playing hopscotch on the desktops at the back of the room, would have been his pole-vaulter.

Bubka moved to Donetsk in eastern Ukraine when he was fifteen, five years after he began vaulting under the tutelage of Vitaly Petrov. The gray, industrial city of five million, the site of the largest indoor track and field center in Ukraine, is brightened in its smoggy pall by the rose bushes that thrive amid the slag heaps from the coal mines.

Because of Bubka, Donetsk would soon be to pole vaulting what Tennessee State University, home of Wilma Rudolph, Madeline Manning, and the Tennessee State Tiger Belles, was to women’s track in the USA in the 1960s. Donetsk was the world headquarters of fiberglass-assisted flight. Because of Bubka’s prowess, the joystick came to track and field long before it did to computer games.

The journey to Donetsk for Bubka’s Zepter Pole Vault Stars meet is not a business trip for Mack and the others. It’s an homage.

“I fly from Atlanta to Frankfurt to Kiev. Then you take a puddle-hopper that Bubka charters to Donetsk,” Mack said. “It was freezing cold inside the plane. We got into Donetsk at 10 at night. We had all been traveling twenty-eight to thirty straight hours. All we wanted to do was take a hot shower and go to bed, and there was no hot water. I guess they turn it off after 10.”

Yet even their stories about the perils of travel contain a core of deep respect. “The mattress might be thin in the hotel. But it’s all right. You’re going there to see Sergey,” said Toby Stevenson.

“The most interesting thing is his mind-set,” said Mack. “After the competition, we would always watch a ballet. Then, we would go upstairs for a banquet and awards.”

Bubka said: “After a competition, your mind is stressed because you have been focused so long. Get away! Relax!”

“Whoa!” Mack said. “That is exactly how I felt.”

Mack theorized that Bubka loved ballet because it’s so much a part of the culture in nearby Russia. Perhaps there is more to it, though. The pole vault is the most spectacular event in track and field, a visual of power and grace that fires the imagination. Mack’s coach, Jim Bemiller, calls the pole vault a “violent ballet.” Perhaps Bubka is Nureyev in spikes.

At the Donetsk meet, Bubka visits with the invited pole-vaulters at a dinner at his restaurant. He spends only two or three minutes with each vaulter, but it has the same allure to them as talking hitting with Ted Williams had to generations of major league baseball players. It’s like golfers getting to talk to Jack Nicklaus and asking: “What’s up with my swing?”

“We put him on a pedestal,” Mack said, “but you can sit down and talk to him like any other vaulter.” The meet itself is pole vaulting crossed with MTV. Spotlights sweep the arena. It is sports as video games, sports as rock concert. But the non-competing host, Bubka, would be the one who was greeted by flaring waves of flashlights and cigarette lighters. The pole-vaulters compete on a wooden floor. Music thunders through the small hockey rink, which seats only 4,800. The choice of tune is up to each vaulter.

“I’d play ‘Lose Yourself’ from 8 Mile,” Mack said. “The first time I went, I was extremely pissed off. I went out early, and Tim Lobinger [of Germany] wanted to know if he could use my music. I thought it was my song.”

Eminem’s song spoke to Mack with a pulsing beat that got into his blood. It started as motivation and became the story of his life. It is about seizing the day, a competitor’s “one shot” to maximize an opportunity that may not come again.

It was in Donetsk on his first visit that Mack first heard the music from the movie A Knight’s Tale. “The theme of the meet was that you were being knighted,” Mack said. “The music was from the movie. Being a knight really appealed to me. When you carry the pole, it’s kind of like jousting, so I saw the movie as soon as I got home.”

The second time Mack was in Donetsk in 2002, he set a personal best (PB) at the time of 19–2¼ (5.85). “I felt inspired getting an invitation from Bubka,” Mack said. “That was when Hartwig jumped six meters. At the time, it seemed very far away to me. As for my PB, I didn’t want to disappoint Bubka, didn’t want to disrespect his turf.”

Knighthood flowered along with the roses in the harsh land. “You could see how Bubka got so tough. That place would toughen anybody up,” Mack said.

Bubka was ten years old when he first picked up a pole. It was like King Arthur drawing the sword from the stone. While many pole-vaulters don’t peak until their twenties or even thirties due to the extremely technical nature of the event and its enormous physical demands, Bubka profited from the same, consistent model of technique from his formative years onward.

“I got all the information I could on the event. I read all I could about it. It is a tough, hard event. But it is also very pleasant. I devoted everything to it. It was my life,” he said.

At the 2004 Olympic pole vault final, Guiseppe Gibilisco of Italy said, “To pole-vault, you must be a little bit crazy.” Gibilisco’s words play into the rakish image of pole-vaulters; his words also anger Bubka.

“I don’t think that is so,” he said. “You must be very clear thinking. You must be a very intelligent man. There are so many qualities: the pole, the grip, the standards, the weather, the plant, the takeoff. You must be a professor.”

Bubka would go over the bar in what he calls “The Professor’s Sport,” screaming like an eagle singing to the wild sky. No wonder the Europeans called him “The Birdman.” Once Bubka was identified as a man who could fly, he traveled with the renowned Petrov as his vaulting coach; Aleksandr Solomahin as his gymnastics coach; and Boris Tulchinsky as his sports psychologist. Petrov once said a pole-vaulter had to learn the “culture of movement.” No one ever busted moves like Bubka.

Bemiller noted that the Polish coach Andrzej Krzesinski, who developed the 1976 and 1980 Olympic gold medalists, likened the training process to charging a battery—a slow input over a long period of time eventually amounting to juice enough to electrify the sky.

Mack—obsessively filling his notebook, a tinkerer building a better mousetrap, the knight with no cities sacked or booty looted to give him fame—could never match the Eastern support system, except in an unbending determination to overcome the obstacles in his path.

“I had strong coaches all the time,” Bubka said. “I do not understand why in the USA pole-vaulters are often by themselves. Psychologically and physically, you need coaches to control what you do, to change this exercise or make that one more important.”

No one has flown higher. No one has ever completely dominated the pole vault. But Bubka came close. He won six World Championships, the first at nineteen years of age. In Helsinki, while most of his competitors complained about the conditions, Bubka took the inaugural World Championships in 1983 by storm. Tianna Madison, a long jumper from suburban Cleveland like Mack, was the only other teenager to win a world title in a field event.

Bubka deserves mention with Carl Lewis and javelin thrower Jan Zelezny of the Czech Republic as the greatest field eventers ever. Lewis won four Olympic long jump gold medals but never held a world record in it. Bubka won only one Olympic gold, but he produced world records like the Ukrainian steppes produced wheat. Zelezny was a world-class javelin thrower for twenty years until his retirement in 2006.

In the pole vault, only Cornelius Warmerdam rivals Bubka. Yet mystery cloaks the reasons for Bubka’s prowess. History becomes his biggest opponent. Bubka’s records have outlasted even those Warmerdam set before World War II. Warmerdam’s mark of 15–7¾ (4.77 meters) lasted fourteen years. Undefeated from 1983 to 1990, Bubka set thirty-five world records—eighteen outdoors and seventeen indoors. His outdoor mark of 20–1¾ (6.14 meters) was set in 1994. His indoor mark of 20–2 (6.15) was set in 1993 at Donetsk. Twenty feet (6.10) remains a threshold only he has crossed.

There is a drawback to the event’s minimalism. The records climbed by the tiniest increments, centimeter by centimeter. A bonus from the Soviet Union of $385 in rubles accompanied each world record. In the glasnost era, it rose to almost $3,000 for each record. When the free market arrived, Nike bumped that up to $100,000 for each one.

The record advanced by the breadth of a gnat’s wings. The argument can be advanced that Bubka was thrilling more crowds and giving more fans lasting memories of the event. Yet it was hardly in keeping with the “altius” spirit of the sport. The ultimate irony is that Icarus soared higher only a pinfeather at a time.

Bubka was the greatest young pole-vaulter, the greatest pole-vaulter in his prime, and he was a good enough pole-vaulter in the twilight of his career to make the Sydney Olympics at the age of thirty-six.

Like other pole-vaulters before him, such as Richards and Lawrence Johnson, Bubka could have been a magnificent decathlete. He ran 100 meters in 10.2 seconds, long jumped nearly 26 feet, and threw the shot 44 feet. He never considered surrendering the pole and living his life earthbound. “I know he beat Yuriy Syedikh, a two-time Olympic gold medalist in the hammer throw, in the shot put,” said Steve Chappell.

“He was the strongest mentally,” said Mack. “No one else has had the total package. My focus mentally is as great as his was. If I was a little faster and more powerful, I might vault 20–2. I’m not even close to him physically. Speed kills, as in any sport.”

Said Kory Tarpenning, once the best pole-vaulter in the United States: “It’s the amount of force he was able to generate. He put 10 to 15 percent more energy into the pole, which is why he went higher than anyone else.”

“Other guys vaulted with stiff poles comparable to Sergey’s,” said Chappell. “Others had similar physical abilities, but he was the whole package, mental and physical, plus all that drive and ambition.”

Even with better poles, more widely disseminated technical information, bigger and faster jumpers, and increased reliance on video study and computer modeling, Bubka still flies solo. Professor Bubka specialized in audacity. He could bend a pole designed for a man forty pounds heavier. The pole-vaulting maxim, playing off a hit movie about soccer, is: “Forget Beckham—bend it like Bubka.”

Former NFL tight end Todd Christensen, doing track and field commentary when Bubka first cleared 20 feet, called him “the world’s most under-exposed athlete.”

A light payload at 6 feet, 175 pounds on a powerful catapult, Bubka went shrieking over bars at which others could only kick impotently with their feet. Estimates are that he could have cleared 20–6 (6.25) or even higher had the bar been set that high. “How much is mental, how much physical?” asked Bubka. “There must be a balance. You cannot simply condition yourself to be physically better than anyone else. You have to be physically fit, stable psychologically, and you still have to have the technical skills. My personal characteristic was to improve myself in everything, in will, in technique. You must be very focused on it all twenty-four hours. You must be very careful away from the runway.”

His life was a battleground. The professor fought with the daredevil. The aloof, tranquil Bubka, sitting alone, would arise and attack the vaulting box like a soldier taking a pillbox. He laid siege to the sky. The victory cry as he streaked over the bar seemed to explode like a firecracker because such stillness preceded it. Perhaps going to the summit in anything makes a man shout at the glory of it.

In Bubka clashed brain and brawn, art and sport, mercenary and Communist, privacy and publicity. The synthesis he developed from the opposites linked earth and sky. He is a great sportsman, and yet some pole-vault coaches suspect Bubka was the driving force behind the IAAF’s decision to outlaw Volzing. Bubka cleared bars like Michael Jordan cleared rims; of course, pole-vaulters think, he would have wanted stubbier pegs for the crossbar.

Ed Dare feels only Bubka could be trusted to study the soft boxes thoroughly, lest they turn out to provide a boost to those who seek his records.

Lawrence Johnson once told of a meet in Sestriere, Italy. LoJo asked for and received a pointer about his takeoff from Bubka. After correcting the takeoff problem, Johnson asked Bubka another technical question. “All of a sudden, he didn’t admit to understanding English,” Johnson said.

In a speech Bubka gave in Budapest in 1997, he addressed part of his contradictions. “I had to learn to be reserved,” he said. “To waste no energy that could be used in competition. By the time I was 15, I had left my family and was staying with my brother Vassily at the sport school in Donetsk. Once, I went to the grocer to buy 100 grams of cheese [about 3½ ounces], but the woman behind the counter tried to give me just ninety grams. She wanted to cheat me. Now I lost my temper. I felt outraged, because I had been brought up to be honest with people.

“But later,” he continued, “I was told: ‘Don’t explode. Don’t waste your nervous energy on these things. You must learn to focus that energy into competition. Give it a good channel.’ As I got older, I began to avoid anything that was too much of a distraction. I realized that I was sensitive by nature and that sometimes I let things affect me. For example, I try not to spend too much time with journalists or even making speeches.”

Few men have been such icons with so many followers eager to sing their praise.

“Bubka is ‘The Master,’” said Toby Stevenson, the silver medalist in Athens. “He was the Nolan Ryan, the Michael Jordan, and the Walter Payton of pole vaulting.”

“Bubka is ‘The Man,’” said Mack, the gold medalist.

Few men have had such iconoclastic peers eager to debunk their image either. “It’s hard to be complimentary of Bubka,” said Bob Richards. “I’m talking about steroids and all the stuff the Russians used. The East Germans were all on steroids. The Russians in Bubka’s time were too.”

“You tell me,” said Don Bragg, Olympic gold medalist in 1960. “What was Bubka on? I’m not saying he still wasn’t great. I’m a guy who wants to legalize everything. You get tested by doctors, and if you have any liver or kidney problems, you get shut down for a while. At least everybody would be honest then.”

Except for the women’s javelin and the women’s pole vault, men’s and women’s field event world records are a decade old or more. There is no doubt that more rigorous drug testing today is the primary reason why.

The contrasting views on Bubka’s marks seem to result from a generational split more than anything. Richards and Bragg—the Cold Warriors, men whose worldview was formed and whose athletic glories were secured in the first years after World War II—knew Eastern Bloc athletes as personally engaging, but they thought the system that shaped them was corrupt.

Mack and Stevenson—younger men who were in high school or middle school when the Berlin Wall fell—grew up with the old Soviet Union reduced to a fragmented squabble of small states, with shadowy Arab terrorists as the national enemy, and with Bubka’s picture on their bedroom walls.

“Bubka faced those questions because he grew up in the Soviet system,” Mack said. “With his speed and jumping ability, there wouldn’t be any doubts about why he jumped 20–2 if he weren’t from that system.”

“Anytime you do anything outstanding, people will assume you’re on drugs,” said Stevenson. “They said I was on drugs when I jumped six meters. They said Tim was on drugs when he jumped so well late in the season. Tim and I proved you don’t have to be on performance-enhancing drugs to jump high. To me, Bubka proved that you don’t have to be on drugs too. To me, he was clean. He had the skills, the talent, the instincts.”

Bob Seagren, who served as a transition between the eras, takes the middle ground. “Who knows? Bubka was inconsistent in the big meets,” said Seagren, the Olympic gold medalist in 1968. “He either set a world record or no-heighted.”

“In my era,” Seagren added, “there was no testing. Dianabol was the big steroid then, but everyone thought it was just the big weight lifters and throwers. The one I was really suspicious of was FloJo [Florence Griffith Joyner]. Your body does not change that much at that age. No, I am sorry, it doesn’t.”

Griffith Joyner died in 1996, at 38. As a child, she had ground up crayons, mixed the bright dust with nail polish, and painted her nails like rainbows. She went from a silver medalist as a curve runner in the 200 in the boycotted Olympics of 1984 to the best female sprinter in history four years later at the age of thirty. Many believed to her death that she was one of the first users of HGH (human growth hormone). She could never outrun the dark shadows behind the rainbow.

“It comes down to the doctor,” said Mike Tully, the silver medalist in the pole vault at the boycotted Los Angeles Olympics of 1984.

“People can judge my place in sports history for themselves,” said Bubka. “I set thirty-five world records and won six World Championships and an Olympic gold medal. I won everything, and my career lasted so many years. I have a great legacy.”

He was always tested for doping, as were other winners. He always passed. He passed tests and set records years after Florence Griffith Joyner had retired and sprinter Ben Johnson had been disgraced. “You will always have suspicions that this guy is using. You wonder what that guy has figured out,” Bubka said. “We had a system that produced champions in the Olympic Games. We had a system of tests, too. I don’t know how many drug tests I took, but I passed them all. The only ones I judge are the ones who have been caught. Suspicion will always exist.”

It’s the curse of drugs in track and field that belief and doubt go hand in hand. Awe belongs today only to the innocent. Bubka’s greatest jump in the clutch, the one that won his only Olympic medal, at once convinced many of his greatness and emboldened his doubters.

Sergey Bubka seeded the clouds. He was so good, he also sowed suspicion.

Told that today’s American pole-vaulters consider him “the Babe Ruth of pole vaulting,” Bubka said: “Can you explain who this person was?”

It is, in many ways, an apt analogy. Baseball is a sport characterized by failure. Even the best batters fail two out of every three times. In the sport’s best-loved poem, the mighty Casey strikes out. The pole vault is a sport that can no more be mastered than a slider low and away on the corner can be hit consistently. It says something about the contrarian nature of pole vaulting that it’s designed to break the hearts of those who love it most. You almost always fail on your last jump, even if you’ve won a meet, even if you’ve won the Olympic gold medal, because the quest is always to go higher.

“It’s a very cruel sport,” said Greg Hull. “You can do fifteen things right, and the one thing you do wrong knocks the crossbar off.”

Bubka chased the Olympic dream his entire competitive life. He won only the one medal. “It’s the nature of the event,” said Mack. “So many things can go wrong. He did get an Olympic gold medal the first time he got a chance at one.”

Olympic years were never normal. When you devote your life to a sport, you take the rough with the smooth. The injuries, the no-heights, the effects of age in clipping his wings—Bubka can accept that. Political meddling he cannot. “I was more disappointed in the Los Angeles Olympics than anything,” Bubka said. “The boycott was so painful.”

The USSR and its political satellites boycotted the 1984 Olympics in retaliation for the USA pulling out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “There was nothing we could do about this stupid decision,” Bubka said. “We suffered, the athletes. I think it was my time. I was in good shape. It would have been easier then than later. [Winning a medal] would not have become something I did not do.”

He set world records shortly before and soon after the 1984 Olympics. It amounted to a declaration that whatever happened in Los Angeles, it was a consolation prize because he wasn’t there to beat the eligible jumpers.

Bubka was an overwhelming favorite in Seoul in 1988. He was in the midst of a seven-year unbeaten streak. Mack doesn’t believe in “psych” jobs, but Bubka developed a strategy of almost passive intimidation. By 1988, Bubka wouldn’t even begin jumping until the bar had climbed to eagle’s nest heights.

In Seoul, Bubka’s rival, Rodion Gataullin of the Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, took the lead at 19–2¼ (5.85). Bubka’s strategy usually was to pass except for three heights—5.70 (18–8¼), 5.90 (19–4¼), and whatever constituted the meet or world record at the moment. He started high and minimized his attempts. He took only four jumps in setting his last world record. In Seoul, he had only one clearance, at 18–8½—and that on his second try. He passed until 5.90. Shockingly, Bubka missed twice. He faced the biggest jump of his life standing in fourth place.

“The third attempt is more exciting,” Bubka said. “The psychological strength has to be more. The Olympics are so much bigger than anything else. The stress was much higher. This becomes the prize, the challenge.”

Bubka seized a longer pole than he normally used, one that was harder to control. He flashed down the runway and planted like a knight who had speared the dragon on his lance. He went screaming over the bar, scraping the sky, the jump so big it beggared belief. It won the gold medal while raising both possibilities and questions.

“I was in Seoul when Bubka won,” Richards said. “He cleared 19–4 by a foot. It was unreal.”

FloJo, Ben Johnson’s 9.79 in the 100 meters, Bubka—there was a lot of that unreality stuff going around. Johnson later tested positive for steroids and was stripped of his gold medal. “Johnson was the only one they caught,” said Richards.

Bubka’s jump in Seoul was all or nothing at all. “I was out of medal position. Timothy Mack’s third jump was a little different in Athens. Timothy knew he had a medal,” said Bubka. “My motto was always, ‘when you have an attempt left, you never lose. You have not lost.’”

He never won again in his three remaining Olympics. “Would I rather have a world record or an Olympic gold medal?” Mack mused. “It’s a tough question, but I would go with the gold medal. Someone can always take the record away.”

The most unexpected failure by Bubka came in Barcelona in 1992. As in Seoul, he passed until 18–8¼. With time running out on his first vault, he rode the pole beneath the bar. American pole-vaulter Tim Bright, mindful that Bubka was often given more than allowable time by European meet organizers hungry for world records, had asked officials to keep Bubka on the clock like everyone else. “In Barcelona, they certainly didn’t give him too much time,” said Mack.

On Bubka’s second vault, he went into the air, riding the solar wind, but brushed the bar off on the way down. Rattled, Bubka passed to gain time. At 18–10¼ (5.75), he switched to a softer pole because of the wind. As he stood on the runway, the wind suddenly died. On the wrong pole, with the clock ticking, he hit the bar on the way up.

Bubka blamed bad biorhythms for what was his only loss of the year. Russian Maksim Tarasov won at 19–0¼ (5.80).

To his critics, Barcelona, almost as much as the never-confirmed drug rumors, clouds Bubka’s reputation. Coddled by meet promoters, playing by rules bent more grotesquely than his pole, Bubka couldn’t cope with the Olympic imperative to peak at the right moment and to jump now.

In 1996 in Atlanta, Bubka withdrew because of an inflamed right Achilles tendon when he was a slight favorite. In retrospect, his achievements might have been even greater had his last years not been plagued by leg problems that required surgery. In 2000 in Sydney, he failed to qualify for the final, missing all three tries at 18–8¼.

“There was the boycott,” he added. “There was the injury. In Barcelona, I was at fault. I needed to be better. You must accept this sometimes. Sydney, I suffered during the season, but I made it there. I did my best. I respect the Olympics too much to have any regrets.”

Sometimes, Bubka credits the gymnastics he learned for allowing him to go up like the high note of an anthem. Other times, he credits the technical mysteries of the plant and takeoff. For whatever reasons, no one flies like he did.

Bubka admits he didn’t expect, all these years later, to still be world record-holder. “The guys jumping today should have jumped 6.30 [20–8] by now,” he said. ‘It comes down to the energy transferred to the pole. This is what Petrov knew. They need to focus on that.”

Said Petrov in 1985: “A pole-vaulter is, in fact, born in the last steps of the run up; the ability to perform the concluding part of the run determines the ability of a vaulter to perform vaults.”

Russian pole-vaulting is, to borrow Winston’s Churchill’s description of the Soviet Union, “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Track and field coaches in the USA buy books that try to demystify the Russian theories.

Pole vault coach Rick Suhr in Churchville, New York (near Rochester), developed 5-foot-6 Mary Saxer, a proficient long jumper who had reached 19 feet, into a 14-foot pole-vaulter and a national girls high school champion after coaching her for only one year. He also developed an All-American in Tiffany Maskulinski, who stood only 5-foot-2. Finally, Suhr coached a U.S. Indoor champion in Jennifer Stuczynski, who cleared 15–4¼ (4.68) in early 2006, the highest by an American woman not named Dragila. Stunningly, she flew that high in only fourteen months with Suhr. Russia’s Yelena Isinbayeva, the dominant female vaulter today, and Dragila took seven years to vault that high. Russia’s Svetlana Feofanova, the next fastest learner on the pole’s curve, took four years.

Stuczynski’s background was similar to Mack’s. She attended a small, Christian liberal arts college, Roberts Wesleyan in Rochester, New York, which was a part of the NAIA. She played basketball, hurdled, and threw the javelin before Suhr, with his practiced eye for outstanding athletes, recruited her to the technical rigors of pole vaulting.

The conditions are primitive, with the training facility amounting to little more than two big, fabricated metal huts, placed end to end, which Suhr built over a pole vault pit. “The huts open to an area where the pit is, with maybe 10 feet on either side. There are two propane heaters, and one of them actually works,” said Stuczynski. “It’s as cold in there as outside but without the wind chill.’’

Suhr has acquired a reputation as a man who understood the “Russian style.”

“I’ve had everything given to me in terms of technique,” said Stuczynski. “I just need to perfect the model.”

Bemiller is skeptical about the East European aspects. “It shouldn’t be that hard to turn a 19-foot long jumper like Mary Saxer into a 14-foot [4.27] pole-vaulter, given the size and athletic ability involved,” he said, although this does not account for the rise of Maskulinski. “Suhr’s athletes may be conceptually attempting the Russian technique but may not look like it, now or ever.”

Lawrence Johnson went to a Russian coach after jumping 19–7½ as a collegiate senior, seeking “The Secret.” He never jumped higher than he did in school.

The fact is that no one in the Western world really knows how the Soviets did it, if you discount doping.

Said Bemiller: “From my perspective, the defining characteristics of the classic Petrov/Bubka vault would be very disciplined run mechanics with great detail on the pole drop, an outside takeoff spot, and a fast, ‘gymnastic’ swing. Coaching from an early age emphasizes running, jumping, and swing mechanics.”

The Russian style, Bemiller said, “is to have a continuous chain of motion. It’s very gymnastic.” American coaches have studied Petrov’s paper on Russian techniques ever since it was published in 1985. There are, however, many ways to get over a bar. The French developed four Olympic medalists, two of them winners of the gold, between 1984 and 1996 with their own unique style. The so-called “tuck-and-shoot” style, which also featured widely separated hands on the grip, is no longer in vogue even in France. Jumpers were too slow coming out of the ball into which they had curled themselves, their knees against their chests, while the pole straightened.

But unlike the French or the Russians, the United States really doesn’t have a national style. There’s no standardized national training, no technical style that develops from pooled information.

“There is no U.S. style,” said Bemiller. “We have a lot of athletes who are very competitive, who try to beat the heck out of each other, and who have studied the event very closely. Yet they help their buddies out at meets. It is the damnedest process.”

The biggest problem with the Russian style is that no one knows what Bubka was like at a young age. No one in the West knows how long “The Secret” was incubating. Film of Bubka before the 1983 Worlds is unavailable. For her part, Isinbayeva, before morphing into the ultimate example of pole-vaulting technique, was supposed to have been on poles that were too small, teetering on the very edge of control, as late as 2002.

Bemiller thinks good mechanics are good mechanics. He thinks fiberglass experimentation led to a drift in the USA from the fundamentals, much as a dunk-centric culture in basketball made the boring old jump shot a lost skill.

“America is the land of the free and the undisciplined,” Bemiller said. “Pole vaulting is not a major concern nationally, so kids get into the event because they love to jump. There is no basic instruction in running and jumping mechanics or gymnastics basics. When Tim Mack improved his run mechanics and pole drop, he was not emulating the Russian method, he was doing what he was working on for ten years at Tennessee and overcoming old habits.”

Bemiller sensibly concludes that Petrov must have studied rigid-pole jumpers such as Richards and Warmerdam as well as modern pole-vaulters such as Mike Tully, Earl Bell, and Tom Tellez.

Perhaps all of Bubka’s vagueness is intentional. There is always the chance it is another Bubka “psych” job, veiling his prowess, planting doubt in the minds of the men who seek to emulate him. Today, Bubka is an influential figure in both politics and international track and field. He is a member of the Ukraine Parliament, in the same party as that of Viktor Yanukovych, the former leader who tried to steal but eventually lost the national election in 2005. Politics is so savage in Ukraine that President Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin during the campaign. Bubka, however, exists in his countrymen’s eyes on a level far above grubbing for votes. When he retired, he was made an official “Hero of Ukraine.” He funded the Zepter meet mostly out of his own pocket, although Nike also contributes. In June 2005 he was elected president of Ukraine’s national Olympic committee. He replaced Yushchenko, who is under investigation for using budget funds to reward Ukraine’s Olympic winners in Greece.

Bubka is also a member of the International Olympic Committee. “The Europeans put him on it. I hear he’s a big cheese,” said Richards, sarcastically.

In the Soviet days, Bubka feuded with the government, once saying: “They did not want to have many examples of thinking athletes. It is better to have stupid sportsmen, young ones who do not know what is going on. Sports life is very short. They [the Soviet regime] discarded older athletes and took new ones, and they used them for the system. My policy was just to give good things for sports in my region.”

The breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s was a tectonic shift in the pole vault. It created a diaspora of sky jumpers. Aleksandr Averbukh, for example, immigrated from Siberia to Israel in 1999. Dmitri Markov is today probably the best of the male Soviet pole-vaulters who were born in the mid-1970s.

In the United States, track and field is a quadrennial sport, followed closely only in Olympic years. The American production line of Olympic champions fell silent from 1968 until 2000. Now there is a revival in the pole vault, keyed by the popularity of extreme sports and the presence of Americans on the top two steps of the medal podiums at the Sydney and Athens Olympics.

Bubka envied Mack and Stevenson’s rivalry. Carl Lewis needed Mike Powell in the long jump, which he dominated even more than the sprints. In the 1960 Olympic decathlon, Rafer Johnson needed C. K. Yang. Bubka only fleetingly had rivals. “Timothy and Toby have all they need to achieve,” he said. “They have one to push the other. I did not have this.”

Only rarely was he pushed for world records. France’s Thierry Vigneron was the bronze medalist at the boycotted 1984 Olympics and a four-time world record holder. He set a record only once after Bubka’s ascent, and then he held it for less than ten minutes. Vigneron jumped 19–4¼ (5.90) to take the outdoor mark in Rome, shortly after the 1984 Olympics, but Bubka came roaring back on his next try at 19–5½ (5.93). It was as close as the pole vault gets to “posterizing” a basketball defender with a dunk. Ever since then, Bubka has held the outdoor world record, inching it ever upward.

Bubka didn’t like not holding records. They made him the North Star of the sport—eternal, unwavering, the one fixed point that gave everyone else a sense of place. Which was, of course, well below his.

Brazilian vaulter Tomas Hintnaus, who holds Brazil’s record and formerly held it for all of South America (18–10½, or 5.75), competed while wearing a strip of rawhide, knotted into a bracelet. The coiled bracelet was as long as the distance between his personal best and Bubka’s world record. Hintnaus said the twist of leather showed him how small a difference there was between being good and being the best. What it really showed, however, was the gap between every other pole-vaulter and the limits of human performance. The sky really was the limit with Bubka.

He always dominates discussions when pole-vaulters gather. What did he know that the others didn’t? He ran to the box as they did, although perhaps faster, and he planted as they did, although perhaps harder, and then he soared above their dream jumps. Yet his defeats and disappointments kept him human. He is the reference point that fixes our concept of the pole vault. He is as important to the sport as the knots are that secure the threads in a tapestry. His name is synonymous with flying in the way Ruth is synonymous with power. Like only a very few of the very best, Bubka is part of the very DNA of his sport.