“Crash” Course

Toby “Crash” Stevenson dominated the first half of the Olympic year of 2004 like skyrockets dominate the sky on the Fourth of July. He was jumping big and flying high. He would charge the sky and overwhelm it just like Bubka.

If he wasn’t Bubka, he was still a strummin’, struttin’ spectacular, letting it all go when he came down from the top of his world. Sometimes, he rode the pole through the pits like Happy Gilmore, doing the bull dance, feeling the flow. Sometimes, he did the “Robot,” walking mechanically like a Star Wars android gone clear across the galaxy and back. Sometimes, he turned the pole into an air guitar, and the fans could catch the vibe—Jimi Hendrix in “Purple Haze” wailing, “‘Scuse me, while I kiss the sky.”

It was a season of crescendos and competitive clarity for him. Toby Stevenson had seen the glory of the event and had breathed the same air as the sport’s legends. He had come to Sacramento for the 2004 U.S. Olympic Trials as the best jumper in the world. On May 8, in Modesto, California, he had PR’d three times in one afternoon, adding an astonishing 10 inches to his personal record. The last height was 19–8¼, the fabled six-meter mark, which in pole vaulting is the threshold of legend. “It was a real breakthrough, a lot of things coming together,” Stevenson said. “When I woke up that day, I knew I was going to jump high, I just didn’t know how high. I wanted to jump 5.90 [meters, 19–4¼], and six meters was just the icing.”

It had been easy. It had been the fulfillment of the mystical, contradictory concept of effortless power. It’s a concept that spans many sports. Baseball players seldom hit home runs when they are trying to. The best drives in golf are pure and chaste, kissed by the sweet spot, not grip-it and rip-it exertions. The best pole vaults are Rocky, once he got in shape, running the Art Museum steps in Philadelphia as if they were a stairway to heaven. Gonna fly now.

“It was what every athlete wishes for,” Stevenson said. “Whenever you do a really good jump, it looks easy. The six-meter jump was the easiest jump of my life. I hit it just right.”

Stevenson tried to reconstruct it, but he couldn’t. The prophet Elijah said mankind only gets a glimpse of the hem of God’s garments. Pole-vaulters seldom see more than a stitch or two.

Veteran pole-vaulter Pat Manson, who cleared 18 feet every year for twenty-one straight years, is a man who should know about meeting the demands of the event. “A perfect jump,” he said, “is like doing a perfect golf swing in the middle of a long jump. There are maybe fifty things that have to go right to make the perfect jump. The world’s very best vaulters do maybe thirty-five of those right, forty at most. You do forty, and it’s a career day. Every vaulter gets a glimpse of it, and that’s what keeps you trying to do it again.”

“It’s over so soon, you can’t really savor it,” Stevenson said of the experience. “You release with more energy than the pole has. It’s a feeling of weightlessness. When it happens, you don’t even see the crossbar to worm over it. You see the crossbar, and then you’re over it.”

“Crash” Stevenson was going over bars as nimbly as a bouncer ready to give the heave-ho to a troublemaker. He went to the Trials as the overwhelming favorite. He won his first five meets of the year. Modesto was a validation of half his life and more, years and years of topsy-turvy soaring.

Stevenson started pole-vaulting in the seventh grade, at the age of twelve. His father, Eddy, had been a 14-foot pole-vaulter in college in the 1960s, a respectable height in that era. Eddy built his son a pole vault pit in the backyard, consisting of a 100-foot-long raised wooden runway, standards, mattresses, and foam rubber they had collected around the hot, dusty West Texas town of Odessa. “You don’t buy a pre-fab kit; you have to use some ingenuity to make a pole vault pit,” Stevenson said.

While Eddy had been a skydiver, Toby, a hell-for-leather street-bike racer as a kid, was expected to use a little more restraint. To please his mother, he vaulted in a roller hockey crash helmet. Hence, the nickname “Crash.” Given his exuberance after clearances, another nickname for Stevenson, “The Cat in the Hat,” seemed equally appropriate. Said the Dr. Seuss character, shortly before falling in a stunt and landing on his head: “Look at me! Look at me now! It is fun to have fun. But you have to know how.”

“Odessa is flat and brown, but it’s a really good place to grow up,” Stevenson said. “I was always in gymnastics. I was a gymnast when my dad put up the pole vault pit. The first day, I jumped about sixty times. The next morning, I couldn’t get out of bed.”

Odessa received national attention with the publication of Friday Night Lights, a book that chronicled the town’s high school football obsession. It’s a town that was down on its luck when the oil patch went bust in the 1980s. Friday Night Lights turned it into a symbol of any community committed too devoutly to athletic excellence.

Stevenson, like any top pole-vaulter, was a marvel of coordination. But by the time he might have caught the eye of the football coach, he was well past the starting age. His PR in high school was 17 feet, enough for Stanford to offer him a scholarship. Anyone who goes to school in golden California carries the aura of it with him like the radiance around a saint’s head in a Renaissance painting. In the cold, dark East, watching events such as the Rose Bowl in California made other Americans, because of the three-hour time difference, think of it as a land of perpetual light, a mellow place about which the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean sang. There, the surf was always up, two girls were always available for every guy, and the latest always arrived early.

Like most generalizations, it wasn’t especially true. Stevenson did have some of the “every day is a nice day” West Coast outlook, but he was a Texan at heart. Maybe only Texas was big enough to contain his emotional surges, which would geyser out after a big clearance and make the oil gusher in which James Dean frolicked in the quintessential Texas movie Giant look weak and half-assed.

“I have always seen myself as a Texan,” he said. “Every state has a lot of pride, but Texas has a little more. Texas has such a great history. Everybody knows ‘Remember the Alamo.’ And it’s such a big state, with so many people. Wherever you are in the world, you have a better chance of meeting someone from Texas than, say, from Rhode Island.”

“Weather, geography, climate—Texans just have a little more of everything,” Stevenson continued. “You can find anything you want there.”

In a state whose present was formed by a past that included Indian wars, cattle drives, and the law of the gun, he was a space cowboy. Records? Bring ’em on!

Improvement can come like lightning striking. It had in Modesto. It could again.

Everything Stevenson did was designed, Bubka-like, to make him stronger. “I don’t think there are any big secrets in the pole vault,” Stevenson said. “I don’t do very trendy training. It’s very boring. I work my ass off when I’m in the weight room. I work my ass off when I’m doing speed work.”

Pigeonholing Mack and Stevenson is unfair to either. But if you had to say which aspect of Bubka each most copied, it would have been brains with Mack, brawn with Stevenson.

Stevenson might not go parasailing or hang-gliding on the day of meets to relax, a daredevil regimen adopted by the American vaulter Tye Harvey, but he enjoyed his success. He would clear a bar and come down bellowing, and then he would be dancing, rapturous, a man who had seen Paradise.

Bob Richards, for his part, was a showman. “I like that emotion Stevenson brings to it,” he said.

Charmingly, Stevenson was not just a Texan full of tall tales and taller jumps, but he had a self-deprecating nature. The pole-vaulter’s common misfortune had happened to the Cat in the Hat—walking out of the pit after a successful jump, catching a spike in the pads and face-planting! It does wonders in counteracting ego.

Mack was much more Bubka’s disciple in terms of self-containment. For example, Stevenson and fellow Californian Derek Miles were always talking at meets in a public display of gregariousness. Mack, the man who didn’t say much, was always private.

“I’m not out to psych out a guy. I’m in my own little world,” Mack said. “For me, not saying anything to the other guys is almost a psych. I’m not talking at all, and they know I’m focused completely on what I have to do. A lot of guys are talkers. Guys like that, it relaxes them. If you don’t talk, they don’t know how to react.”

Mack isn’t rude, but he burrows into that tunnel where the vaulting cues are stashed, and hoards his energy there. He might as well be Bubka, paring down unnecessary emotions just as the market cheat whittled down the small wedge of cheese when Sergey was a boy. He might as well be Seagren, unaware of the civil rights protest on the victory stand at the 1968 Olympics because he had a world-record bar to challenge.

Bubka, however, would go over the bar with a banshee yell. At meets, “What’s up?” is enough small talk for Mack.

Of his celebrations, Stevenson said: “It’s not real craziness. But we are a professional sport. The crowd is a huge part of the event. Any pole-vaulter will tell you that. I want the crowd to be totally excited when I’m out there. If they see this guy going crazy after clearing a bar, they might tell their friends, and they all might come out the next time. I see it as helping the sport, helping other pole-vaulters.”

“Crash” is an inch shorter than Mack at 6–1, but he weighs ten more pounds. More bulk in a smaller package gives him a more strapping appearance. With his mane of dark hair, his helmet, and his chin “patch,” Stevenson is the most recognizable figure in the event. With his theatrics, he is also the most flamboyant. By contrast, with his face an iron mask, with every extraneous emotion shorn off like his ruthless haircuts, Mack doesn’t give anything about himself away cheaply. Restraint isn’t a prison for Mack; it’s a weapon.

“Toby was jumping pretty high early in high school. I wasn’t,” said Mack. “But you compete against the event itself—all the years that have gone into trying to master the pole vault, all the emotion you have invested. Over a competition, what Toby does is a lot of energy to expend. At the end, if you have spent even 1 percent of your energy on that, it might be what it takes to clear the bar. My attitude to Toby is, ‘Fine. Waste that energy.’”

Mack is the reluctant daredevil, the freethinker who devised a stouter lance, the outsider over whom few schools fought. He was convinced three years out that 2004 was his year. Nothing was going to detract from the skill and will it took to get over the bar. He would conserve his resources, hoard his energy. They wouldn’t know what hit them.

“I’m not a selfish person,” said Mack. “But it’s all about me at a competition. I’m really selfish then. I never minded being out of the spotlight. It isn’t about having fun. I want to jump as high as I can, make money at it, and compete. That’s what guides me. My energy goes into jumping higher.”

Stevenson had been the best jumper in the world in the first half of 2004. Still, he knew what Miles had thought in the Jonesboro, Arkansas, pre-Trials meet of the onrushing Mack. “Whoa. Whole new jumper!” Miles had said as Mack nearly scraped over six meters.

The whole new jumper had made his promise to himself of Goldnathens. Now, he was back in the same city where he had failed four years earlier, back in Sacramento. Mack was about to show he could fulfill his secret, glittering pledge.

The capital of California, Sacramento is a city without Los Angeles’ Beverly Hills chic or Hollywood sign, without San Francisco’s little cable cars climbing halfway to the stars, without Oakland’s piratical Raiders and “Just win, baby” ethos, even without San Diego’s zoo.

By bidding on and winning the Olympic Trials in 2000 and 2004, Sacramento sought to establish a reputation as a track hotbed. In terms of track interest, record numbers of tickets were sold to Sacramento State’s Hornet Stadium in 2000. In terms of being, literally, a hotbed, it also reached its goal. In the summer, Sacramento is hot and dry. The “Delta” wind, so named because its origin is over the delta of the Sacramento River, seldom blew during the 2000 Trials. The heat reached the nineties regularly. It wasn’t as hot in 2004, but the sun, the dust, and the smoke from the pit fires of the concession area barbecues still gave it the feel of a meet Lucifer would have loved.

The stadium, courtesy of a $1 million renovation financed by San Diego Chargers owner and Sacramento businessman Alex G. Spanos, was the site of the 2003 NCAA Track and Field Championships. After a pause in 2004 for the University of Texas to stage the event, Sacramento became the host for the collegiate championships the next three years. In some ways, this is typical of the shortsightedness of the people who run track and field in the United States. The time difference ruthlessly curtails the ability of Eastern and Central Time Zone newspapers to cover the event. Track and Field News also complained that Hornet Stadium was “antiquated,” despite the makeover, with “horrid sightlines.”

Perhaps no one can actively discourage interest in track and field more energetically than the people in charge of it. There were two “rest days” during the eleven days of the 2004 Trials, to drag the Trials out for two weekends and expand network television coverage.

Nike used the first rest day, July 13, to unveil the official Swoosherized, streamlined, body-hugging, cutting-edge USA uniforms, supplied by, ahem, you-know-whom. USA Track and Field publicist Jill Geer introduced the runners and jumpers. While Mack wasn’t one of the models, Mack’s girlfriend, Grace Upshaw, one of the most photogenic track and field athletes, was there. Toby Stevenson also posed on the stage. The choice of a pole vaulter was, according to longtime coach Greg Hull, a no-brainer. “Pole vaulters tend to be physically attractive men and women. They have wide shoulders, narrow hips, and they’re tall, lean and muscled,” he said.

Dozens of track and field writers, scrounging for angles on a fallow day, showed up at the modeling session. Many hoped for interview opportunities beyond the fashion do’s and don’ts, although such questions were discouraged and discussion instead centered on fashion. Other reporters attempted irreverence. But in the technogeek sport of track and field, many reporters were perfectly happy to explain why Nike apparel was just another weapon in Uncle Sam’s ensemble.

Knights fitted with armor plates weren’t tended to any more meticulously, it seems. Mack, the battered and bloodied knight, would have appreciated Nike’s “armoring” efforts. He had watched A Knight’s Tale time and again because he identified so closely with Will Thatcher, the “half-starved scarecrow with lots of spirit,” who dubbed himself Ulrich von Liechtenstein.

Media attendance, embarrassingly, was far less on the next rest day, when Sacramento’s Chamber of Commerce brought some of the greatest track and field athletes in the country’s history to the convention center downtown. Sacramento knows how to revive memories. Old Sacramento is a 28-acre area of historic buildings restored to the way they were in the Gold Rush days. The early days are reflected in the wooden sidewalks, horse-drawn carriages, and Mississippi-style riverboats. It was only a few blocks from “Old Sac” with its steam engines and one-room schoolhouse to the convention center. But the men and women who made track and field history were only an afterthought to those in charge of the sport today.

Bob Beamon, who jumped over the boundaries of what was possible; Bob Mathias, twice the Olympic decathlon gold medalist, the first time at the age of seventeen; Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the greatest female track and field athlete since Babe Didriksen; the Tennessee State Tiger Belles, featuring Madeline Manning, who dominated Olympic track when racism and sexism could have held them down—no one who loved track and field would have stayed away.

But Nike had no stake in it, and the official USATF media guide barely mentioned it. As about thirty writers roamed between the tables in the cavernous second-floor ballroom, visiting those stirring yesterdays, you had to wonder: How can America nurture future track and field stars, when its nature is to ignore the most glorious names of the sport’s past?

Americans who make it through the Trials have already been through an almost Darwinian selection process. Any of ten men could have gone to Athens at the 2004 Trials. Only three would. All of the sky-jumpers knew that.

In the American system, there’s no reserving a place on the team for a dominant track and field athlete who picks the worst time of the year to get injured or fall ill. No spot was held for the great sprinter Carl Lewis, when he was sick at the Trials in 1996 and was lucky to make the team as a long jumper and nothing else.

There’s no provision made for the inexplicable screwup, such as when decathlete Dan O’Brien no-heighted his opening bar, set at 15–9, in the 1992 Trials. That was the most shocking example ever of the pole vault as a disaster event. A jump of 12 feet would have put O’Brien on the team in Barcelona. Instead, he stayed behind. In subsequent decathlons, he made his first jump at 15–1 to make sure he got a mark in. “I can practically sit over that [15–1] bar,” he said.

So high were the stakes that the deeply religious Macks went to mass at the towering Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament each morning when Tim competed. Candles they had left burning shed a soft light, as they prayed for God to guide him to his best efforts. A friend of his mother’s had also asked the nuns at Our Lady of Victory in Lackawanna, New York, the friend’s hometown, to pray the rosary for Mack.

Ten Americans had cleared 5.80 meters (19–0¼) going into the 2004 Trials. No 19-foot pole-vaulter at the Trials had ever failed to make an Olympic team. But there is a first time for everything.

In the lead-up to the Trials, Bemiller, ever encouraging, tried some psychological reinforcement on Mack. When they would talk, Bemiller would say: “See ya later, Champ.”

“Oh, my God. Did he just call me ‘Champ?’” Mack said the first time it happened.

Psychologists call this “Pygmalion therapy,” after the Shaw play that was the basis for the musical My Fair Lady. The idea is that a teacher’s (or coach’s) expectations about a person eventually lead the person to behavior that confirms the expectations. Call a man a champ, and he’ll be a champ—provided he puts in the 10,000 hours of work Bob Richards advised as complements to a daily bowl of Wheaties.

Every stadium offers its own peculiarities. Hornet Stadium, with its 22,000-seat capacity, the largest in the NCAA’s Big Sky Conference, was no different. Reporters reached the main press box and the auxiliary one on its roof via an antiquated elevator run by an operator who swung the dungeon-like gate shut. In the heat, different operators came on every few hours. It was sweltering in the tiny oven-like contraption. Dust stirred in the burning wind. The setting sun glared on computer screens in the rooftop press box. Daily journalism is frontline stuff, but in the aerie atop the sun-baked stadium, it felt like being a cat on a hot tin roof.

For competitors, it was even tougher. “It’s a difficult venue. It’s a low stadium, open-ended. The wind gets in there and swirls around. You don’t get a nice tailwind every time,” said Bemiller. “It has variable winds, usually a crosswind, right to left. The runway is also on a crown [the rise in the field that allows water to drain]. A lot of runways in the United States are on the straightaways. Running on the crown can throw your stride off. You run up the crown, and then you come back down it. You push a little harder with your stride going out, and you’re a little bit out of position the second half of your run.”

Jeff Hartwig knew about being out of position. It was getting to be an old story for him in Sacramento. “There are always certain people you expect to do well,” said Stevenson. “But that’s the beauty/frustration of the pole vault. Anything can happen. Look at Hartwig.”

“If you need proof of how tough the wind is, Mr. Hartwig could attest to that. Twice,” said Bemiller.

Pole vault qualifying was the first day of the Trials. Hartwig—who had perched on the stack of sticks as the chartered plane droned to Bubka’s meet in Donetsk, who had gone higher than any American ever when he jumped 19–9½ (6.03) in 2000—would be gone almost before the meet began.

It was a bumpy landing. But he was getting used to that in Sacramento. He had also no-heighted in Sacramento in 2000. The thirty-six-year-old Hartwig came to Sacramento knowing it was probably his last chance at an Olympic medal. They begin as boys, going where eagles dare, as sunshine jumpers up on the roof. At the end of the day, not even the highest-flying of them are guaranteed the splendor of sunset.

Hartwig had jumped all the way to the shrine of pole vaulting in Bubka’s hometown. In Sacramento on July 9, he missed all three tries at 5.50 meters, or 18–0½ (four, actually, since he was given an additional vault after winning a protest). The American eagle had landed with a thud.

An official red-flagged Hartwig for taking too long on his third attempt. Jumpers have one minute after the bar is set in qualifying to make an attempt. The fickle winds picked up as Hartwig began his last run, and then it became an agony of indecision. It’s what every competitor fears, flying by the seat of his pants, unable to get his bearings. It’s why Mack built a support system of numbers. It’s one of the most difficult things to do in one of the most difficult disciplines in sports, changing poles and strategies while on the clock. Indecision put the bar too high even for Bubka on his no-height in Barcelona. There are no odds high enough against clearing a bar in such circumstances.

“On my third attempt, I stopped short because the wind hit me,” said Hartwig. “As I started back to restart my run, I asked how much time was left, and I was told twelve seconds. I ran back to the end of the runway and grabbed a different pole, because I was tired. As I picked up the pole, the official at the pit raised the red flag.”

Hartwig protested that the marks he had placed to direct his route had been moved. The protest was upheld. But when, twenty minutes after the qualifying ostensibly ended, he took his do-over, he knocked the bar off again.

“My heart went out to him,” said Stevenson. “But am I relieved he’s out? Yeah, I am.”

Mack was surprised Hartwig got another chance. “At that point, I don’t think it made much difference for Hartwig,” he said. “The fact that Hartwig was out increased my chances. I hated it for him, but my margin of error went up.”

They dream of flight. But when you are as old as Hartwig in Sacramento, Icarus falls hard.

Lawrence Johnson also no-heighted. Four years after the Olympic silver medal; after winning the U.S. Trials in 1996 and 2000; after being dubbed the best black pole-vaulter there ever was; after being the University of Tennessee pole-vaulter who always overshadowed Mack; after years of breaking down barriers; after all that, Lawrence Johnson had failed to clear the 18-foot bar. To increase his speed, Johnson trained with controversial coach John Smith of HSI Sports. HSI sprinter Mickey Grimes received a two-year ban after testing positive for steroids from USADA in 2004, while two other HSI sprinters, Torri Edwards and Larry Wade, also drew drug-related suspensions.

Only the injury potential of pole vaulting kept LoJo from perhaps becoming the Tiger Woods of the event and changing the parameters of what was possible. You’re going to get punished in the pole vault, because it’s not just rare air and the zero-gravity convergences of a perfect vault; it’s a hit pit, just as running a pass route over the middle in the NFL is a collision curriculum. But sometimes, a man has just taken too many hits. That is likely what happened to LoJo in Sacramento. “He didn’t have any kind of base,” said Bemiller. “He was banged up in the ankle and the shoulder. He needed a year off to get healthy. He also has other demands on his time now. He was married with two kids.”

The top-ranked collegiate pole-vaulter, Tommy Skipper of Oregon, also no-heighted despite a re-vault. Skipper had a glittering record that made him a name to watch—national high school record holder as a junior at 17–8 and a senior at 18–3, Track and Field News High School Athlete of the Year, Pac-10 pole vault and decathlon champion, the latter in his first-ever decathlon. Still, Mack saw in Skipper a flashback to himself in Atlanta—unable to adapt, doomed in the struggle to get over the bar.

“There was a strong wind from the right side,” Mack said. “You don’t go into qualifying to try to win it. So, in the wind, I changed poles. I wanted to use the softest pole possible. I was prepared, and I didn’t want to mess around. But he [Skipper] never adjusted.”

As for Mack, he hit his one jump at the qualifying standard perfectly. The muscle he had gained since 2000 in the weight room, sweat droplet by sweat droplet until they became rivulets and then skin-slicking, shirt-plastering torrents, gave him the strength to fight the wind. Ten others also qualified.

It isn’t necessary to win the Trials. You just have to finish in the top three to make the Olympic team. In the final, Tim Mack would have to make the team or miss it on one jump that put at risk the dreams of more than half his life.

Track and field possesses a terrible yet satisfying objectivity. “At least,” said Bragg, “I didn’t have to kiss up to any judge as a pole-vaulter. I’d never have made it in a subjective sport.”

A scoring error in the men’s all-around gymnastics final in Athens threw the gold medal into the hands of lawyers, and the case went all the way to the Court of Arbitration for Sport before American Paul Hamm got to keep what he had won in the arena. Biased judges have denied boxers their due too, most notably Roy Jones Jr., who used a South Korean’s head as a speed bag in 1988 yet lost to home cooking, prepared by the judges in Seoul.

No such uncertainty attends track and field. It is scrupulously timed and carefully measured. For that very reason, track and field is also spared the Golden Age yearnings of other sports.

Team USA in men’s basketball in Athens was considered by purists to be an insult to its illustrious predecessors. But you never find anyone arguing that Jesse Owens could run faster than Athens 100-meter gold medalist and former University of Tennessee sprinter Justin Gatlin. There are always anomalies, like Florence Griffith Joyner and Bubka, with all their baggage of drug suspicion in the 1988 Olympics. But in many ways, these are the good old days. No one is trained to such a pitch of readiness, with such expert coaching, such nutritional exactness, such computerized feedback and, undeniably in a few cases, such chemical enhancement as track and field athletes today. In a world in which not even the 2000 American presidential election was resolved at the ballot box, but rather in the courts; in a time in which America has fragmented into quarrelsome red and blue enclaves; in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust for the electoral process and constitutional guarantees, track and field offers finality. Citius, fortius, altius. Firstest gets the mostest. Highest touches the stars.

Mack, of course, came to the Trials to win. Anything else would represent a compromise, a betrayal of the work ethic that had fueled him for so long. He was becoming a great clutch pole-vaulter precisely because he never took it for granted, always worked for what he got, never had it made, always had to stay with it, and never forgot that genius and talent are dust under the wheel of persistence.

The Trials were a preview of Athens. The biggest jump of his life until Athens had nothing in it of Bragg’s “picture this” perfection. No flashbulb blazed in his head. There was nothing of rope swings or tree houses to it. There was nothing of effortlessness, no analogy to sending the little white, dimpled ball streaking out there like a flash of light, right down the middle of the fairway. There was nothing of the Lost Boys either, unless it was the immaturity Mack had shed over so many years of competing.

When Tim Mack jumped onto the Olympic team on the afternoon of July 11 in Sacramento, he went through turbulence. He fought for every inch of lift. He never backed down even though elements of the jump were unsynchronized. He never once considered aborting it. He made the jump work. He hit back. He fought his way to the stars like the martial angels of John Milton in Paradise Lost.

The final at the Trials was a spectacular enough competition as it was, with four men jumping 19 feet. Even more, it displayed all the factors that make it such a compelling event—clutch clearances, height enough to make a groundling’s head swim, the first-ever 19-foot jumper (Tye Harvey) who stayed home, and tactical maneuvers that made it seem like airborne chess. In such a contest, you go with the knight who had been through the most jousts with the bar.

Passing after a miss is a gambit that introduces a new hazard. The miss carries over to the next height and reduces the competitor’s complement of attempts. At the Trials, there were more passes in the pole vault final than in the singles bars around town.

Russ Buller, who had trained with LoJo while Mack drilled alone at Tennessee, passed first after missing once at 18–4½ (5.60 meters). At 18–8¼ (5.70), Miles and Mack cleared on their first attempts. The two thirty-one-year-olds were tied for first. Harvey scraped over at the height on his third try. Buller, who would pass thirteen times in all, wriggled over it, too. But then Jim Davis, using the passing strategy, sailed over at 18–10¼ (5.75). At 19–0¼ [5.80], four vaulters missed once then passed. One of them was Mack. This forced him to make a critical decision.

“Toby, Miles and Harvey had all made 5.80,” said Mack. “It did me no good to jump at it. If I cleared, all it meant was I would have three tries at 19–2¼ [5.85], not two. I didn’t need attempts. I needed to clear a bar before anyone else.”

“He was in first place at 18–8,” Bemiller said. “We said we’d see what happens. He missed his first jump at 19 feet, and too many other guys had cleared. It was a worthless jump. I was proud of him. He never thought twice about passing. The problem was not height that day. The problem was getting off the ground cleanly.”

Bemiller was standing near the fourth turn of the oval, on the same fence in the same stadium where he had stood in 2000 when Mack flamed out and kicked the bar off going up in the final. Bemiller’s blood was up. Perhaps he undervalued how daunting 19–2¼ was. “I was thinking about everything [in the jump] being in the right place and being aggressive. But that height would have gotten you a bronze medal in Athens. I should have been more nervous about it,” he said.

Miles now was first with no misses through 19–2¼. Stevenson was second at the same height, but he had missed once at 18–8¼ and then cleared. Third was Harvey, who made the one attempt he had left after passing a good one.

Mack, with a best bar of 18–8¼, missed on the first of his two tries at 19–2¼. He was in seventh place with one jump left. It was Eminem’s one shot, one opportunity to seize everything he wanted. One try to go from peasant to knight, from toilets to the torch.

“So much was riding on that next jump,” said Tim O’Hare, who was signaling wind direction to Tim in the stands. “I felt the pressure as a fan and a friend. I thought, ‘Oh, no. He’s been jumping 19–4 for three weeks!’”

“Oh, my God! I could be out,” Mack thought as he faced the bar at 19–2¼ for his last attempt.

Then he said: “The hell with that. I am going to do everything I had learned over a lot of years to give myself a shot. I have been planning this for years.”

Mack looked into the stands and found Tim O’Hare, who gave him an urgent wave. The signal meant he had a tailwind: the pole-vaulter’s friend.

“It’s okay to be behind, as long as you’re not pressing or stressing,” Mack said. “Perseverance is what I do.”

The jumping cues were all he was thinking about. Keep your posture. Work your arms. “The Book” had banished mental doubts. “I knew I was on the right pole. I knew the standards were right. It came down to a matter of will,” said Mack.

As Mack began to run, “B,” craning his neck from the fence, saw that his pupil had missed his mark at the midpoint. When you’re running for your life’s dream, cads might as well be chasing you. All the scripted choreography can become garble. You run as if everything depends on it, because it does.

“He was one foot inside his mark at the midpoint, but I thought he was okay. He wasn’t leaning or falling forward on the run,” said Bemiller. “He should have hit the mark at 54 feet, 6 inches, but he was a foot inside.”

No turning back now, “B” thought. “You’ve got to go!” the voice inside Bemiller’s head was screaming, as the crowd rose all around him, roaring. “A lot of vaulters get too close to the box, and they’ll brake or not push on the pole,” the coach said. “But Tim had to go, no matter what. It was his worst inside step of the day and worst takeoff. But he attacked with his arms and kept his posture.”

“My body was making adjustments in the air,” Mack said. “It was like going the wrong way in a car. You’re on some side streets, and you’ve got to get back on path. You don’t take the main streets, and you can’t stop for directions at the 7-Eleven.”

Mack went over the bar like an upside-down limbo dancer, wriggling and writhing. He brushed it with the jersey on his chest, no harder than the flutter of an angel’s wing.

“I knew I didn’t hit it hard enough to knock it off. You know it when you’ve done that,” said Mack.

“It was bouncing around a little bit,” worried Bemiller.

When the quivering died away to a twitch and then to a tic and then to stillness, Mack pumped his fist triumphantly. For just one instant, the knight could raise his visor. The rigid control could unbend just a bit. For an eye-blink, Tim had become Toby, jubilant in the pit. He came out of the pads like the cork comes out of a bottle of champagne.

Miles missed three times at 19–2¼ and would be going to Athens as the third man on the team on fewer misses over Harvey. The reigning Olympic champion, Hysong, was out at 19–2¼ too. So both Sydney medalists, Hysong and Johnson, were gone. Hartwig, the American record holder, was gone. At the Trials, history is something you make, not something you can lean on for support.

First place now was up to Mack or Stevenson, and Mack—the pressure off, the team made—busted his best jump in Sacramento, skying over the bar at 19–4¼ like a jet contrail.

“He was on the team, so he was living it up, being aggressive. He was way over it,” said Bemiller.

Bemiller and other coaches thought that jump, on which Mack had about 10 centimeters (four inches) of clearance, was one of the best jumps, attained with the most blinding swing speed, that they ever saw.

On his second and last attempt, “Crash” was over the bar by so much he could have had on landing gear and retractable wings, but he thumped it on the way down.

“Oh, you’re good. You’re really good,” Mack’s mother later told the friend from western New York who had asked the nuns to pray.

In the pole vault, it isn’t over even when it’s over. You always do an encore, always play another set, always take a final bow. “There are two constants about the pole vault,” said Russ Johnson, Mack’s old University of Tennessee roommate. “There’s no doubt whether you succeed or not. But you always end on a miss.”

So they set the bar almost a half-foot higher at an American record, 19–9¾ (6.04). Mack’s first two tries were very close. Asked how close he had come, Mack said: “Close enough to make it next time.”

The victory meant he would go to his first Olympics as a better-known underdog, a journeyman who had brushed the bar but would get to fly on toward the sun. The golden dream he had lived with every time he turned on his computer was close enough to touch.

Mack, Stevenson, and Miles took the victory lap in Hornet Stadium, each holding a portion of a giant American flag. Mack’s hand was on the striped end. In so many ways, however, he had reached the unreachable star.