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Dreams |
It’s gotta be the shoes? Bemiller wouldn’t swear by the theory advanced by Spike Lee in Michael Jordan’s early Nike commercials, but he was taking no chances. On the day of the pole vault final at the Athens Olympics, “B” caught the Metro, riding the train as it rumbled down toward the Plaka, the oldest residential area in the city. This time, he knew the way. The old agora of ancient times, the city’s marketplace, is huddled to one side of the Plaka. Above it is the Acropolis, crowned with the marble monuments that were the glory of the ancient world. Nearby is the Temple of Theseus.
For his part, Bemiller wasn’t one to ignore a routine that had previously worked. He had made this same trip two days earlier when Mack had qualified for the final, although not without duress. “I went the first time for shoes. I went the second time for karma,” the coach said.
On August 25, prelims day, Bemiller, wearing a vivid, floral-printed shirt that made him look like a man late for a luau, prowled the Monistiraki Flea Market. Finally, after wandering through a maze of narrow alleys, he found the shop of Stavros Melissinos, “The Poet Sandal Maker.”
It is a small, dark, and cluttered place. Most of the storefront is devoted to photographs and news clips featuring Melissinos and famous people. John Lennon had been an early fan, and he brought the rest of the Beatles to the shop. Jackie Onassis, Rudolph Nureyev, Sophia Loren, and Gregory Peck were other customers.
While Melinissos has remained a cobbler all his life, his poetry is highly esteemed in Europe and is taught in British universities. Melissinos once wrote:
Take away the Glories and the Honors
The granite palaces of this vain World
And only give me the Smile of Pain, the Tear of Joy
And I will erect a thousand palaces in me in which to live
Greece was not a dusty museum that can only preserve the past, the poem said. In Greece, life was intense and deeply felt. The emotions poured out like the heady wine from Zorba’s goatskin.
The truth of the assertion was not hard to find. “Hel-las! Hel-las!” the Greeks chanted whenever a countryman or woman won a medal. “Greece! Greece!” In the preliminaries, Bemiller and Mack found that the nation could pass for an outdoor madhouse on a jubilation bender.
After Bemiller had bought sandals for his daughters Gracie and Kelsey and his wife Missy, he discovered he was running too late to return to his apartment and change for the qualifying. So he showed up with the dust from the Plaka on his skin and the Hawaii Five-o shirt on his back.
Some coaches subscribe to a general theory that under Olympic pressure one-third of the field will not reach the level of performance that got them to the competition; one-third will equal that level; and one-third will exceed it. And so qualifying, just as in the U.S. Trials, was filled with unpleasant surprises for big names.
Five men at the Athens qualifying had jumped six meters—Stevenson; Dmitri Markov, now jumping for Australia; the German pair of Tim Lobinger and Danny Ecker; and South Africa’s Okert Brits. Mack would cross the threshold of greatness shortly after the Olympics. Australia’s Paul Burgess would do so in 2005. That meant half of the fourteen men in all of history who would clear the golden bar were competing in Athens. It was truly a conclave in the clouds.
Markov didn’t even make it far enough to challenge the automatic qualifying (AQ) mark of 5.70 meters, or 18–8¼. He missed at 5.65 meters, or 18–6½. Only Bubka had ever jumped higher than Markov, but now Markov was gone in a fiery plunge.
France’s Romain Mesnil, a 19-foot man in 2004, like Markov, scraped over on his third try at 18–6½ but missed the AQ mark. Brits, who had jumped 18–10¼ earlier in the year, couldn’t clear either.
Mack, after easily making 18–0½ and 18–4½, passed until the AQ mark. But before he could make his first attempt, Athens native Fani Halkia raced out of the night like a goddess from Mount Olympus, descending to slum around with the mortals. Fresh from an Olympic record in the semifinals, Halkia stormed to victory in the women’s 400-meter hurdles minutes before Mack was to jump. It was Greece’s first gold medal in track and field, and the party-hearty Athenians’ dancing shoes were on. The wild music from Zorba the Greek rose to a mad pitch, louder even than the exultant roar of the 72,000 in Olympic Stadium. The mandolin-like instrument making the frenetic music was called a bouzouki. The bouzouki bazooka-ed. The crowd chanted “Hellas! Hel-las!” Blue and white Greek flags flew in the stands as Halkia took a victory lap that would have gotten Terrell Owens, Joe Horn, Randy Moss and every other dancin’ machine in the NFL a penalty for excessive celebration. “Hel-las! Hel-las!” rang out. It went on and on, a tear of joy that glistened in every eye in Greece.
Hours later, weary journalists, returning at 5 A.M. to their college dormitory–style rooms, would get only cursory security checks from the normally grim-faced Greek Army soldiers stationed at the gates with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. “We won!” shouted one soldier with a smile like daybreak lighting his face. “Hel-las! Hel-las!”
Tim Mack had been an outsider at the party for years until his skills gradually increased. Now he was on the runway, readying for his qualifying jump, the most important moment of his life to that point, and Halkia’s gold had reduced him to the very definition of the word “inconsequential.” The riot of sound swept all Mack’s rigid control and iron discipline away. Halkia, a Greek flag in her hands, was rounding the curve near the pole vault pit when Mack, who was on the clock, started to run toward the vault box. “Hel-las! Hel-las!”
A feather had a better chance of riding out a tornado. “It went on and on,” said Mack. “I had jumped 6 inches higher than that bar, but the Greek girl won the hurdles, and then it was the all-time party.”
Tim O’Hare, who had spent $2,400 of his own money to fly to the meet and scout the wind for Mack, stood in the stands above Bemiller, stunned by the deafening ovation. “It was my first international meet. I felt I was at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville at a big football game,” he said. The colossal stadium on the banks of the Tennessee River has a listed capacity of 104,079.
Mack, visibly flustered, missed badly. “I ran differently, rushed and missed. I got too caught up in it. I was mad that I allowed myself to get caught up in the surroundings,” said Mack. “It was a lesson learned.”
On his second attempt, Mack cleared easily enough for it to have been just another day at the altitude office. He bagged his poles then walked slowly over to where Bemiller was sitting. Mack took in the “Where’s the roast suckling pig?” attire of his coach. “Don’t wear your beach shirt to the final,” Mack said.
In Greece, history was literally underfoot. One of the reasons the Greek organizers barely beat the IOC’s deadline on building competitive venues was the archeological prizes the backhoes and bulldozers kept unearthing. Greece invented organized sports. The Greeks were the first people to play, which said much for the quality of life they established. As classical scholar Edith Hamilton famously observed, a people burdened by toil, narrowed by religious proscriptions, and cowed by fear does not play. The Greeks did.
The greatest sports festival of the ancient Greeks was held in Olympia in western Greece in a valley green as springtime despite the summer heat. Three other great festivals were held in other parts of Greece. A truce was declared for the quadrennial Olympics in the ancient world, one that protected spectators and participants traveling to Olympia.
The men’s and women’s shot put competition was held at Olympia in 2004. It was a master stroke. The Greeks returned the Olympics to the ground in Olympia where organized sports began in the world. And they did so in the least intrusive way, for the shot put requires only about a 75-foot-long playing field. It was a four-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Athens for those who traveled there to report on it. The distances must have been absolutely staggering in the ancient world when the methods of getting there included sandal power, rowed galleys, and swingin’ low in your sweet chariot.
Almost every modern competitor—in Athens if he was not lucky enough to have gone to Olympia—channeled some of the spirit of the old Greeks. It was a corny ideal, especially with the Summer Games grown into a sporting lollapalooza listing teams from 202 countries and with the drug scandal clouding track and field. Still, in Athens, and particularly in Olympia, you checked your cynicism at the admission gate. The impractical, unlikely, and inextinguishable ideal was that people from different places with different customs could meet in peaceful contests and find in their common aspirations unity and equality.
Rivers gorged with snowmelt from distant mountains made Olympia an oasis in the searing heat. This, you came to understand, was how sports worked too. For all their drawbacks, they irrigate our souls. Mack was as aware of the historical setting in his first Olympics as anyone on Team USA. “I wanted to feel the spirit of the place,” he said. Mack had studied Olympic history when he was getting his master’s degree from the University of Tennessee. He brought a disciplined, almost severe appreciation of time and place with him to Athens. He always brought the same respect to Bubka’s meet in Donetsk and to the Prefontaine Classic.
“Greece was the birthplace of the Olympics, so obviously it’s a very important place to every track and field athlete,” he said.
When the family gathered in the Mack home for Christmas in 2003, his mother Arlene presented everyone with a cap that read “Athens 2004.” Mack also received a license plate frame with the logo on it. He stuck with the “Go Browns” frame he already had and never wore the cap. “It wasn’t that I thought I would jinx myself,” he said. “But I had too much respect for the place to tarnish it in any way. I did have the email address, Goldnathens, but that was a quiet confidence.”
During qualifying, he knew he had violated his own rules of restraint. It is the Tim Mack version of the ancient Greeks’ belief in self-control. “I got too into the surroundings, and it backfired on me,” said Mack. “Every pole-vaulter likes to feel the energy of the crowd, but you can feed off the fans only to a point. It was so loud and so crazy and went on so long that I got too pumped up. It was more than I could handle.”
There has always been a dichotomy in Greek life. The ancient Greek believed his own body was a battleground in which the sun god Apollo’s reason vied for the upper hand with the wine god Dionysus’ passion. On the holiest shrine in ancient Greece at Delphi, words attributed to the legendary lawgiver Solon were carved into the rock: “Nothing in excess.”
But how couldn’t you go overboard in your first Olympics, particularly in Greece, where it all began? The first thing Mack had done after getting home from the Trials was go to Wal-Mart and buy a $500 video recorder. It was with him every step of the way in the Opening Ceremonies. It was used in his brief photo op with LeBron James.
“There was no way I wasn’t going to be at Opening Ceremonies,” he said. “But it was six hours on your feet, too. It went so fast when you finally marched out that you almost couldn’t enjoy it. Afterward, Toby and I sat with our lower legs in buckets of ice at the USOC training center. We figured we might as well get a head start toward recovery.”
Mack would keep his focus at all costs. Russ Johnson had sent him a video that was almost eerily accurate in predicting the future. It ended with a digital photo Johnson had made with a little computer magic, one that showed Mack holding his arm high with a gold medal draped around it. “I dubbed in my voice like the P.A. man,” Johnson said. “‘Please turn your attention to the pole vault pit where Tim Mack has just won the gold medal and set an Olympic record.’ It was so weird. It went exactly that way, too.”
Mack knew that watching motivational tape was like being inside the stadium for Fani Halkia’s victory lap. He couldn’t view it often. “My nervous system would have been shot if I did,” Mack said. “I always tried to be like Bubka before a competition. He said he was always calm before a major meet. I tried to be introverted, too.”
In his notebook, Mack had written: “Conserve and excite.” It was meet strategy. Conserve your energy; ignore extraneous activities. Then, when it’s close to your turn, open yourself up to the energy of the surroundings and let yourself become excited. Such an approach required balance. Then again, if pole-vaulters don’t know about keeping their bearings in strange surroundings, outside the comfort zone, who would?
Even Bragg—the Peter Pan of vaulting, whose antics seemed to typify the motto “I won’t grow up”—was cautious at the Olympics. He would see John Thomas, the heavily favored American high jumper, dancing the night away in Rome in the Athletes’ Village in 1960 and wonder if Thomas realized what was at stake. Sure enough, two Soviet jumpers finished ahead of the lanky American jumper. Thomas had left his legs on the dance floor.
“We got a feel for the Games, but just walking around and soaking it in wasn’t for us. We had a goal, a mission. If we missed anything, it was well worth it,” said Bemiller.
“I roomed with Derek Miles,” Mack said. “That was fine, but I didn’t want to make it too social. I got away for thirty minutes to an hour each day. You’re there for a reason. You’re there to win a gold medal.”
It was a thin line Bemiller and Mack were walking. At least they knew where to get the shoes. Mack went to Europe after the Trials supremely confident. Ever since the Prefontaine, he had known little but victory. But many things can suddenly go wrong in pole vaulting. Few of them are more wrong than showing up with a smile on your face, a song in your heart and no poles. Every pole-vaulter has such lost luggage stories, although how such ungainly bundles get overlooked or misplaced by baggage handlers is a mystery to them all.
Mack arrived in France for the Paris grand prix meet with no poles. “They assured me they would be there when I checked in,” he said. “It has happened before. It will happen again.” He borrowed the poles of Russia’s Igor Pavlov. But every pole-vaulter has his own procedure with his own poles. With strange poles, Mack didn’t trust the notebook, and he no-heighted. “I wasn’t mentally into it,” he said. “Rather than trust the numbers, I thought an easier way was to make the softer poles work. I was really pissed afterward.”
Averbukh won at 18–10¼.
Hartwig, so bitterly disappointed in Sacramento, his own chance at the gold long gone, offered Mack encouragement. “There will be plenty of other meets for you,” Hartwig said.
When the poles arrived at last before the next competition in Stockholm, Mack was a meet behind in devising the proper adaptations. “Stockholm was really my first meet in Europe, and I was still making adjustments from the last competition,” said Mack, who finished third there with a vault of 18–6½ (5.65). Denis Yurchenko from Ukraine won at 5.71 (18–8¾.)
Mack wouldn’t vault below 19 feet the rest of the summer. He won his last seven meets and 10 of his last 11. “Going into Athens, I was almost on autopilot,” Mack said. “I was walking around, so confident, so comfortable, nobody had anything on me. I could feel it. These guys aren’t even going to know what hit them. I was in the zone. Even if my jumps weren’t good, I was clearing bars.”
He won the Heusden Grand Prix in Brussels at 19–0¼ (5.80). At the prestigious Weltclasse meet in Zurich, a prime indicator of Olympic performance, he jumped 19–2¼ (5.85) and won. “Eighteen-eight had been my best in Zurich until then,” said Mack.
Zurich is the best event of the European season annually, but Mack put even more importance on it. “I treated it as the Olympic final,” he said. “I knew the same people were going to be in Athens, and I wanted to use it as my final tune-up, because I wasn’t going to be jumping for more than two weeks.”
Mack spent an idyllic two weeks of training in Crete, where Bemiller joined him. Both Mack and Grace Upshaw, who had qualified for the Olympic long jump in Sacramento, developed such a taste for the island’s olive oil that they would order more bottles after returning to the States. “The whole island was Paradise,” said Mack.
On their last night together on Crete, Mack bought a bottle of red Greek wine and tucked it into his backpack along with plastic water glasses from his room. He called Upshaw and suggested they take a walk. It was ten o’clock at night, with the moonlight a gold ribbon on the Mediterranean Sea, when Mack opened the wine. “I always wanted to drink wine on a beach,” he said to her.
“I was shocked but pleasantly shocked,” said Upshaw. “It was the first time he had ever made a gesture like that. And it was such a romantic gesture.”
Their romance remained a secret, so it didn’t capture the headlines, as did American hammer thrower Harold Connolly’s courtship of Czechoslovakia’s Olga Fikotova, his future wife, in the 1956 Olympics. Mack and Upshaw had, however, first met in track-appropriate circumstances. “It was the National Indoors that Tim won [in 2002] in New York. We were sitting next to each other, waiting for our drug tests,” Upshaw said.
As Team USA headed to Greece, Mack took a hard-eyed look at his competition.
“Everybody goes there to win the gold medal,” he said. “Some will fall short. Some didn’t have a chance to start with. There have been a lot of meets where I went in thinking of winning, and I had no right to think that because I wasn’t jumping high enough. I don’t know if anybody loses the gold, because nobody is guaranteed it. A handful of guys have a chance to win it. But I think Toby and I both knew it would come down to us two. Nobody else was jumping like we were.”
Just as pole vaulting requires strength and suppleness, just as it is contested on the ground and in the air, so Mack was a blend of opposites: practicality and idealism. He had thought out the sport as fully as anyone since Bubka. He had revamped his body. He was, as the dreamer Don Quixote and the sensible Sancho Panza were in combination, a reasonable idealist.
Track and Field News, the self-styled “Bible of the Sport,” in its print preview of the Olympics, picked Stevenson to win, with Averbukh second, and Italy’s Guiseppe Gibilisco third. “I don’t think they knew Gibilisco had been injured and had only trained fifteen days before the Olympics,” said Mack. “I didn’t look closely at the rankings. It would just be extra energy. I’d be thinking, ‘I can’t believe they didn’t pick me.’”
If the “Bible of the Sport” hadn’t read “The Book” of Mack, it still noticed his superb form coming to Athens. In a later preview that was sent to subscribers by e-mail during the Olympics, Track and Field News picked Mack to win. Meanwhile, Sports Illustrated picked Stevenson to finish first and Mack to win the bronze medal. “Both magazines should have picked Toby,” said Mack. “He had the best jump in the world to that point. He had cleared six meters. But I said to myself, ‘They don’t know me.’”
Bemiller liked his pupil’s chances as well. “He was ready in his confidence. He got a late boost in confidence between the Prefontaine and the Trials. Everybody was jumping 18–8 to 19–0. Only three guys had made 19–2¼—Tim, Toby and Averbukh.”
Mack and Bemiller had made a minute study of Olympic Stadium. It had the same configuration as Hornet Stadium at Sacramento State, with the two pole vault runways on the crown at the end of the field.
“I had talked to the coach of Mike Tully, the 1984 silver medalist in the pole vault, who has done a lot of work on stride pattern,” Bemiller said. “It was the same problem as Sacramento. You run uphill and then downhill. In the elite facilities in the United States—Tennessee, Oregon, Modesto—the pits are parallel to the straightaways, so you get less swirling wind and no crown.
“When you run the uphill part, you have to keep your posture. You also don’t cover as much ground because it’s uphill, so you move your marks up a little. When you start downhill, you turn it over [stride] faster, and you cover ground faster.”
Sacramento had been a cloud-seeding circus, a jumper’s delight. As a pole-vault coach, however, Bemiller has seen better venues. “We just got lucky and had a good day with the conditions in Sacramento,” he said.
“B” did like the steeper pitch to the stands of the much larger Olympic Stadium. It would act as a windscreen. Also, the competition would be held in the evening. Usually, the wind died down in Athens at nightfall. This meant all of Mack’s painstakingly calculated figures, based on the wind being dead, would probably hold.
A final complication would present itself the night of the final. To speed the process along, two runways and two pits were set up in qualifying. Mack had vaulted on a different runway than in the final. “It made the start point a little different, and that concerned me,” he said.
Mack was the oldest pole-vaulter in the Top Ten in the world rankings. Eight years had built to one moment. He had stayed with it and stayed with it and stayed with it until he became Calvin Coolidge’s kind of guy. He had stayed with it through defeat, disappointment, and near despair, through injury, through penury, stayed with it when everything, including common sense, said he should cut his losses. Now, Mack was about to apply all the lessons so painfully learned. The dark horse was about to come from behind. The thatcher’s son was going jousting.
The frenzy of competition began with the stillness of belief. On the morning of August 27, the day of the Olympic pole vault final, eight members of the Mack clan went to St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox church in the Plaka. When they left, eight candles they had lighted for Mack burned in a sand bucket.
Tim’s cousin Gary Laco rollerbladed to the top of Lykabettos hill, which looks down on the Acropolis. Only hikers, extreme sports enthusiasts, or the very devout attend services at the wedding-cake white church, St. Leviticus, on its summit. Laco, although not particularly religious, felt he was channeling the spiritual feelings that surrounded Tim. He also left a candle burning.
In suburban Buffalo, the white nuns, as they had also done two days earlier for qualifying, as they had done in Sacramento at the Trials, were murmuring the words to the rosary. They dedicated one decade of beads to Tim Mack.
In Canton, Ohio, Ralph Schreiber, Brian Kelly, and others who had known Mack had logged onto the Internet and were waiting for the symbols that determined over (o), miss (x), or pass (p) to appear on their screens during the pole vault final.
In Augusta, Georgia, Russ Johnson, finishing his training as a physical therapist, had returned from the hospital where he was working with geriatric patients who had undergone hip and knee replacements. His computer was warming up too.
In Cleveland, Chico Kyle was teaching class. Storms were possible in the afternoon, when he would hold football practice.
In Athens, Bemiller, wearing a white golf shirt—not a beach shirt— and a red cap to be easily visible, returned from the poet sandalmaker’s shop in plenty of time to visit with a calm and relaxed Mack on the warm-up track. “B” claimed his seat in the front row of the Olympic Stadium, near the pole vault pit. He saved two seats for his friends and fellow vaulting coaches, Greg Hull and Ralph Lindemann. “I was right in front where Tim could see me easily,” he said.
He had his pick of seats. It was 4 P.M. in Athens. He was four hours early.
At 6 P.M., Bemiller, who had been in constant contact with Mack by cell phone, got a rude stare from an Australian coach who had just made his way to the vaulting area. The Aussie’s only job was to reserve seats for the Down Under contingent. Two hours ahead should have been plenty of time. “He was pissed,” said Bemiller. “I was such a rookie; I didn’t know when to get there.”
Later, the whole “pole-vaulting crew,” as Bemiller called them, would squeeze into seats around him. They were the top coaches in the world, the flight controllers of never-never land. “I had idolized those guys, and there I was, coaching against them,” said Bemiller.
Tim O’Hare rose from his pallet on the floor of former University of Tennessee decathlete Grant Cleghorn’s apartment on Marathonus Ave., named for the fishing village that was the site of both the battle of Marathon and the start of the twenty-six-mile, 285-yard race named after it. O’Hare got to his seat in plenty of time to see his best man vault.
The women’s long jump final began at 8 P.M., five minutes after the men’s pole vault. It would end at 9:45 P.M. Upshaw finished tenth and didn’t qualify for the final three jumps. Mack admitted later that he occasionally peeked at the long jump standings and tried to watch her jumps.
When the women’s 4X100 relay runners tore around the third turn, near the pole vault pit, Stevenson stopped to watch. “Where are we? Aren’t we in this?” he wondered, not knowing that the Americans had been disqualified for an illegal pass of the baton.
“Was that going on at the same time?” Mack said when asked about it later. “I honestly didn’t even know that event was taking place.”
In the jumping order for the final, Mack jumped third and Stevenson fourth. The two top guns would fire back to back like duelists.
During the long, tense night, Mack found that the visualization techniques begun in 2000 with Joe Whitney made him feel right at home. He basked in the glow of the Olympic flame because had warmed himself with it countless times in his mind. He had jumped toward the cauldron many times in his imagination.
“When I walked onto that field, I was thinking, ‘which way is the wind blowing?’” Mack said. “I was thinking I had to warm up. Nothing else came into play. It was my coach and me. The crowd was there for energy, but nobody else existed. It’s over time that you come to master that.”
The imagination, Mack would prove, is an attribute, as much as speed or strength.
“Tim’s event was even more difficult because it came near the end of the Olympics,” Whitney said. “It’s easy to get caught up in the emotion and the excitement of what’s been happening. With everything that was going on in the pole vault, with his relationship with Grace Upshaw, with this being his first Olympics, it was really remarkable that he was able to stay in the moment.” Bemiller’s script for the final was as prescient as Johnson’s digitally doctored photo.
The coach had much to consider: the time between attempts, the demands of jumping again after only one day’s rest, the time between jumps as related to the size of the field, and the likely increments of the competitive progression. “B” knew that in seven of the ten Olympiads since the real advent of the fiberglass pole in 1964 the winning pole-vaulter had set an Olympic record. The old mark was 5.92 (19–5), set in Atlanta in 1996. “I put a check mark by 5.95 [19–6¼]. I thought that would win,” Bemiller said. “I didn’t want Tim to back in or win because nobody jumped high. I wanted to go out there against the best in the world, and I wanted him to jump well.”
“We planned not to jump at 19 feet,” added Bemiller, eliminating the fractions. “We were going to jump at 19–2, then every bar after that.”
The sixteen-man final was the largest since twenty qualified in Montreal in 1976. It caused Mack to make a small adjustment in his preparations. “Knowing it was going to be a long competition, I ate a little more than I should have,” said Mack. “I had three small meals. I felt a little full, but I was okay once I got over the first two bars.”
Three jumpers went out at 18–6½, including Lobinger. Mack, still ruing the extra meal, had his first glitch at the height, needing a second try to clear. It would almost cost him the gold medal. Typical of the way this particular knight’s visor admitted a glimpse only of shiny possibilities, he remained upbeat even after the miss. “When Lobinger went out, I felt the waters were parting,” said Mack.
On the same bar, Pavel Gerasimov of Russia, who had jumped 18–11 (5.77), missed the pit. It was one more reminder, at the highest level in the world, the Olympic final, that the danger of the descent is as much a part of pole vaulting as the rise to the gabled roofs of possibility. Gerasimov took off far to the right side, clipped the bar off, and sliced over the right standard like a missed extra point in football. He landed flat on his back on the infield, unmoving. The crowd seemed to flinch as one, and a low moan—“Ohhhhhh!”—keened through the stadium.
“I saw him out of the corner of my eye, and I knew he wasn’t going to make the pit. I thought, ‘God, he doesn’t know,’” Mack said.
Said Bubka: “He [Gerasimov] was too far right when he planted, and he tried to save the attempt. You must remember: you are a human being, not a machine.”
Medical personnel rushed to Gerasimov, who lay sprawled on his back. For ordinary people, it would be IVs and “get the stretcher” at this point. Pole-vaulters are different. Eventually, the Russian got to his feet, rubbing his lower back. He passed until 18–10¼ (5.75), but halted his run halfway to the box because the pain was too much. He then withdrew.
“To be a pole-vaulter,” as Gibilisco said, “you have to be a little bit crazy.”
“I couldn’t believe he was walking around and tried to jump,” Mack said. “This sounds bad, but you can’t be worrying about someone else. My thought was that they had medical staff to take care of him. In the pole vault, you should expect everything, anything, and nothing, as they say.”
Five more men went out at 18–10½. The shocker was Averbukh, who bailed on his third attempt and rode his pole into the pit. “They were dropping like flies,” said Mack. “I didn’t know what to expect with Averbukh. Technically, he was wound tight, really explosive. He is an 8,000-point decathlete, so he was damn legitimate.”
Miles needed a third jump to clear the same bar. Ecker, another six-meter man, would reach a season best by clearing on his first try.
By 19–0¼, every jump might mean a medal. Stevenson, who had gotten the crowd into it after an early clearance with a belly dancer’s “shimmy-shake” of his hands and hips, had a clean record, but so did Gibilisco.
The daredevils scratched their heads and pondered what to do next. With Mack, there was never a question. “They were all scrambling, trying to figure out who was going to pass. Toby asked Tim if he was passing,” said Bemiller. Mack never hesitated. “They only give medals to three guys, so a jump there might have been in the money,” said Bemiller. “A little doubt crept in with me.”
Mack walked toward Bemiller, who hid the doubt behind the generic question: “How ya feelin’?”
“No way I am jumping this height,” said Mack.
Mack is a man who sticks with the process. His coach approved the decision and thought it meant Mack’s eyes were on the ultimate prize. “See, if you’re just thinking of the top three, you’re not thinking of winning,” said Bemiller.
Five men passed in all at 19 feet. Two of the passes were by Miles, after a first-attempt miss, and by Lars Borgeling of Germany, who had two misses. Igor Pavlov then cleared to take the lead. It was a career best for the Russian. But his lead lasted only long enough for Gibilisco to leave the bar quivering on the pegs at 19–2¼ (5.85). The surprise World Champion in 2003 at Paris, when he cleared 19–4¼, Gibilisco had seemed too wounded to contend. But his coach was none other than Vitaly Petrov, Bubka’s old coach.
“I could see some of the effects of Bubka’s old coach,” said Mack. “I could see similarities to Bubka in the way he carried himself and, technically, in the way he carried the pole, planted and finished his jumps. He was very active and explosive.”
Gibilisco’s clearance had followed earlier misses by Mack and Stevenson at 19–2¼. But the Italian was far from pulling off another surprise championship. “That bar is not going to be high enough today,” Mack thought.
Mack uncorked his best jump of the Olympics to clear easily. Now at least the silver medal would go to him if no one jumped higher. But Stevenson, next on the runway, went up, up and away, too.
Miles with the two chances he had left couldn’t make the bar. Borgeling failed with his one try. Miles would finish seventh, Borgeling sixth. Ecker, done at 19–0¼, would be fifth.
Four were left—Gibilisco, the leader with a clean record, Stevenson, Mack and Pavlov, who passed his third at 19–2¼.
On his next jump, Mack matched his PB from the Trials at 19–4¼. But Stevenson had plugged into the clapping, pleading, encouraging energy from the stands as well. He put a big jump of his own on top of Mack’s. When Stevenson popped to his feet in the pit, the Toby Stevenson jump fest and 40 Licks tour had come rockin’ into Athens. He raked at an unseen guitar’s invisible strings with his hand, playing, perhaps, a silent version of “Satisfaction.”
“I knew I had a medal, I just didn’t know which one,” Stevenson said. “I figured 5.90 would medal. Tim and I were back to back all day, which made it more exciting. He threw it in my face, and then I came right back.”
Gibilisco stared at the bar he had cleared for his World Championship, as if visualizing a repeat performance. He ran to the box, planted, swung up toward the dark sky, and then aborted, sailing under the bar. He then passed, saving two tries for 19–6¼ (5.95). He would make no good attempt at that height either, finishing with the bronze medal.
Pavlov, on the periphery of the drama, finished fourth after his miss at 5.95.
It had come down to Mack and Stevenson, as both had known it would.
Track and field is at its best when it features head-to-head matchups. Carl Lewis vs. Ben Johnson in the Olympic 100-meter final had the aura of a heavyweight title fight. The hybrid 150-meter race between Donovan Bailey and Michael Johnson after the Atlanta Olympics briefly took track beyond its usual status as a niche sport. Heike Drechsler vs. Jackie Joyner-Kersee in the women’s long jump and Renaldo Nehemiah vs. Greg Foster in the 110 hurdles were rivalries of all-time greats.
Mack vs. Stevenson was a purist’s rivalry, free of the vanity and arrogance that often mars the sprints. Their duel broadened the appeal of the pole vault by pitting opposites—introversion and “let’s party” exuberance—against each other in a sky fight over the most coveted prize in sports: an Olympic gold medal.
Only Stevenson, jumping on the longest pole of anyone (17–0½) and holding at the very top of it to Mack’s slightly lower grip on a 16–8¾ pole, had been to the outer limits of six meters. Stevenson had the past success; Mack had the new horizon. He had experience; Mack had momentum. He had the name; Mack had “The Book.” And in it, Tim Mack would soon write an Olympic record.
Both Mack and Stevenson missed their first two jumps. Stevenson ran through the pit on his first try. This was a more serious setback than simply dislodging the bar in the riptides and chop at the edge of big air. “I ran through the first time, and that was not conducive to coming back with a good chance,” he said.
Both Tim and “B” were surprised Stevenson didn’t fight the vault through to its conclusion. Each attempt is a chance to learn on the pole’s curve. Failure to launch takes that away. Mack had spent years gaining the knowledge of how to control his body and where to plant which pole with the standards at what setting in order to jump as big as his dreams.
“You can’t wait on the jump,” Bemiller said. “Unless you are in an unsafe position, you always attack all the way through the jump. If you don’t, you don’t know what adjustments to make, so your second jump is really your first.”
After Mack’s second miss O’Hare caught Bemiller’s eye. Knowing that Stevenson was leading on fewer misses, O’Hare shouted to Bemiller: “Way to go! Silver!” Bemiller glared back. “He didn’t want to hear it,” said O’Hare.
“I had to believe, so Tim could believe too,” Bemiller said.
The difference between first and second now was one miss, Mack’s failed try way back at 18–6½. Bemiller pulled out the yellow index cards on which he kept the same data as in Mack’s notebook, checking to make sure the pole was right for the height and the standards were at the proper spot for the jump.
Petrov snorted in derision. “You should have that in your head,” the Russian said.
Assured that he and his coach were on the same index card, Mack walked to the runway for his third try at a bar no one had ever cleared in the Olympics. It was his tenth jump of the Olympic final. The event takes so much out of jumpers that most pole-vaulters are at their best over no more than a half-dozen attempts. But Mack had stuck with it. Now he faced the moment that would prove Calvin Coolidge correct.
“You are not going to lose. You have worked for this moment too long,” he said, in a murmured pep talk.
“Goldnathens went through my head,” he said. “I set that up and I didn’t call it Silvernathens.”
Mack moved his starting point back one foot, to 135 feet, 6 inches. He knew the adrenaline pump would be wide open. “That was a part of it,” said Bemiller. “You’re so pumped. But do you trust yourself to move back a little bit because of it?”
Mack had chosen a stiffer pole, and he propped it on his shoulder and raised his arms above his head, slamming his palms together, rhythmically clapping, as the late-night crowd caught the beat. It was contagious. The whole stadium began clapping along with him. The Athenians were more enthusiastically into audience participation than people dressed in funny costumes ever were on Let’s Make a Deal! They had repeatedly done “The Wave,” leaping in unison from their seats and raising their arms.
From somewhere high above Mack, Gary Laco’s whistle shrieked in the tumult. Mack could hear him, knew it was their recognition signal, but he couldn’t find him. In the stands, O’Hare had been jumping to his feet as soon as Mack was on the runway, gauging when the wind was just right, waiting to give the “go” signal to his best man, the man who had coached him, the “man for others” whom the Jesuits had taught well.
“Down in front! Down in front!” the Greek spectators shouted.
“They were cheering, ‘Hellas! Hellas!’ pretty loud when any of their athletes was doing something,” said O’Hare, resentfully. “But the Greek guy next to me and Grant Cleghorn was happy. It was obvious we knew one of the guys competing, so he was cheering with us.”
When O’Hare gave him the signal, Mack brought his arms down and the pole up. It was late night, the lights that reminded him of Friday nights in high school were on, and his whole career was about to be defined in the world’s brightest spotlight.
“He will make this,” Don Mack said, simply, to Arlene. “He has worked too hard for this not to. He has poured his heart and soul into it.”
Every other event was over but the pole vault. The jumpers had been out there for nearly three and a half hours, but that was still only an eye blink compared to the old days when a pole-vaulter seemed to start a meet as a boy and end as Tarzan by the meet’s conclusion.
“If you start thinking about a personal best or an Olympic record, you put too much pressure on yourself. I couldn’t focus on losing it all in a split-second,” Mack said. “I wasn’t jumping to win at that point, just to stay alive. So I was just thinking about two technical things. I was thinking about posture and arms. It was taking everything you believe and trust to do this.”
As the thunder from the stands amped his adrenaline even more, Mack muttered his vaulting keys.
“Work your arms!”
“Keep your posture!”
“You will make this!”
It was three years after he started Goldnathens, four years after the last Olympic opportunity, eight years after he started reaching Olympic Trials, and almost nineteen years after he started pole vaulting.
Nothing else is close to Olympic sports for putting so much of an athlete’s competitive life on the line. Nothing else asks such a commitment of the Churchillian qualities of blood, sweat, toil and tears, or reveals so much of a man’s innermost dreams to the world. In Tim Mack, the man had met the moment, and he would make it his own.
At 11:24 P.M. in Athens, Mack began his run, headed for the stars.
“B” never thought it was a good idea to bombard his pole-vaulters with too many specifics during a meet. “I don’t want them to hit a mark. If they get in rhythm and start running better, the takeoff would come out okay,” he said.
On good days, Mack launched at 13½ feet. Usually, he was more like 13–2 to 13–5.
Hartwig launched farther out, and so do many of the Euros. But it is all a balancing act. “You can be gripping high and taking off from far out, and it still might not translate into height because your swing is not effective,” Bemiller said.
Mack ran heaven-bound and hell-bent. Even with the deeper start, he covered the ground in huge gulps. “I overran,” said Mack, “which I was afraid of doing.”
He was “under” on his takeoff, taking off a stride too close to the box. It was Sacramento all over again.
“On his best jumps, he’s clean on the takeoff, and the pole moves faster. Instead, he got jammed,” said Bemiller.
Mack went up, bending the pole with the weight of his dreams, cracking the code of the air by staying with the jump when it seemed lost. As the pole’s recoil lashed him upward, he knew he was in trouble.
“Halfway through, I thought I was going to miss it,” he said. “I thought I was going to hit the bar on the ascent.”
That was how it all came to grief at Sacramento in the 2000 Trials. But that was then. This was now.
“He had to fight from the bottom up. Again,” Bemiller said.
“It would have been real easy to abort. But on your last try, as close as you are to your dream, as close as you can possibly be, almost touching it—you can’t abort,” Mack said.
When Bemiller speaks about the 19–6 vault, it isn’t in biomechanical terms. It’s in the tones of Knute Rockne whipping the Fighting Irish into a froth with a fiery pep talk.
“Hit with your hands. Attack,” Bemiller said.
The numbers in his book had taken away doubt and now would redefine the Olympic record.
The prayers in Lackawanna, New York, the soft candlelight in St. Nicholas and St. Leviticus, the karmic bank in which Mack had made so many deposits while working for others—none of that hurt.
The blisters on his hands from the work in Bemiller’s yard, the tea-bags, the Dodge Omni, the pre-dawn bike rides to the rec center to clean toilets, the spurned sponsorship letters, the M&D Track Club, the hobbled year without the sport he loved so much, the three-year plan based on deprivation—all fueled his trip to the bar as well.
Maybe muscles have memory too. Maybe only someone who had devoted himself, mind and body, heart and soul, as completely as Mack to pole vaulting could synchronize the required moves in his sinews, independent of thought, apart from the suffocating pressure.
Mack twisted and got off the pole, and now it was ballet two stories off the ground. The Greek drama was at its peak as he writhed over the bar, his knees staying out of harm’s way by a margin of—what? a votive candle’s guttering flame?
He pumped his fists and screamed in triumph all the way down then sprang to his feet in the pit, still bellowing while the roar from the stands engulfed him.
In the stands, Tim O’Hare was cheering so hard that you would have thought the Vols were beating Florida and the band was belting out “Rocky Top.” When another buddy, decathlete Chad Smith, came running over, a standing eight-count practically had to be issued. “When Tim wriggled over, I started throwing my arms around and going crazy, and I punched Chad in the nose by accident,” O’Hare said.
His parents hugged in their seats and wept.
Upshaw had found a seat on the second level of the stadium. She went racing down the stairs to field level, screaming in glee.
In Canton, Ohio, Kelly and Schreiber were on the phone to each other, laughing and cheering. “Our computer screens were refreshing at different speeds, so we thought this way, if one of us found out the results first, he could tell the other,” Mack’s old coach said.
In Augusta, Georgia, Russ Johnson started hurrahing over the phone to his father. Look what had happened to the skinny kid who looked like he didn’t belong in the Georgia Dome. “Oh, my God! He made it!” cried Johnson.
Standing near the pole vault runway, Toby Stevenson, in his heart of hearts, didn’t think he was going to need another jump. As Mack came screaming out of the pit, Stevenson shook his head. He hadn’t counted on that. He had expected the gold, not everything, anything and nothing.
“I was surprised he jumped 5.95,” Stevenson said. “You don’t think about somebody jumping a personal record and an Olympic record on his last attempt.”
“Toby felt he was in control,” said Bubka. “I think he thought he had already won. Timothy got a very strong belief in himself from the Trials. It was too early for Toby to think: ‘This is enough.’”
Mack climbed out of the pit, angry that he had let go of as much as he had. “I was a little pissed at myself for celebrating that I had cleared,” he said. “It’s like golf. You tell yourself that the guy you are playing will make his putt. You don’t take anything for granted. I told myself Toby would make it, and then, we would jump at six meters.”
As Stevenson went to the runway, one thing Bubka, “The Master,” had said stuck in his head like a photo in an album. Said Stevenson: “Bubka always said to clear it by a ton, then you can make adjustments.”
“I didn’t even watch,” said Bemiller. “I couldn’t. I could tell what happened from the crowd reaction.”
Mack wasn’t looking either. He was psyching up to jump six meters.
Stevenson cleared it by a ton. But he brushed the bar off on the way down. “That’s the pole vault,” he said.
Stevenson rose, howling in frustration, and spiked his helmet on the pads.
“I think my steps were a little under where I wanted to be,” he said.
It is another of the opposites pole-vaulters must balance. They get “under” when they get overexcited. “Maybe if the standards were five centimeters [two inches] closer, I’d have made it,” said Stevenson.
That, of course, was one of the final adjustments Bemiller and Mack had made after the Pre. They had moved the standards in, from the maximum depth of 80 centimeters to 50–60. Thirty centimeters is about a foot. For the narrower arc Mack got when he was “under” on the takeoff, it was the perfect adjustment.
In Cleveland, the storm that had been brewing all day had hit.
“We get these strange, sudden storms off Lake Erie,” Chico Kyle said. “August is football season in Ohio. We were on the practice field, and I could see these terrible, crazy clouds forming. The wind changed, and they swept in off the lake.”
Kyle thought he had about two minutes before the storm hit.
“Two minutes later, bang! We got hit,” he said. “I ran around, gathering up the leather footballs. On a Catholic school budget, they can’t be damaged in the rain. I ran into my office to get the composite cover balls.”
Rory Fitzpatrick, the assistant athletic director, had been on the computer, too. “My God!” he cried. “Tim Mack just won the gold medal!”
“I would never have known it if the storm hadn’t hit,” Kyle said. “I think the Lord wanted me to run in there.”
In one great leap upward, Mack, competing on a world stage against the best in his sport, had become the school’s most illustrious athlete ever.
Mack had led only once, on the golden jump. He had four misses, the equal of the most ever by a gold medalist. Only twice since jump-by-jump records were first kept in the 1928 Olympics had anyone gone on to win the gold medal after so much struggle. His ten jumps to win equaled Richards in 1956 for the most ever. His thirteen jumps overall (counting three misses at six meters after the golden jump) are the most ever in an Olympic final.
It was a masterpiece of strategic thinking. “All night, I kept waiting for those guys, the best in the world, to step up. Only Toby and Tim did,” Bemiller assessed.
“People do not realize what a great Olympic moment this was,” said Whitney. “People seldom PR in the Olympic pole vault.”
“People thought he was a dark horse, because he only jumped 13–6 in high school. But whatever he does, Tim Mack is a fierce competitor, whether it’s golf, video games, or whatever,” Russ Johnson said. “I knew deep inside he was going to win. It would not be right for him to finish second.”
“He was the most deserving guy of any of them,” O’Hare said.
In Athens, Bemiller was looking at Tim after he had become golden. “The fans wanted to celebrate,” “B” said, “but Tim was going through his same routine.”
“He’s not through jumping yet,” Bemiller thought.
“I don’t want a hug or anything,” Mack said, when he came over to talk to his coach.
Can you imagine any athlete—much less an athlete from America, where the vast popularity of American Idol demonstrates people’s intense need to be a star—winning it all and not at least pausing to hold up an index finger, lest anyone think he was not the A-No.1, grain-waving, fruited-plain-treading ideal of athletic supremacy? Toby Stevenson would have danced all night.
“It showed how focused he was,” said Bemiller. “He was going to go right at six meters. It would be easy to let up, because in your subconscious, you know it’s been a long night—but not Tim. That’s what sticks with me: He knew he was passing at 19 feet when all the others wondered what to do, and, after he won, everyone wanted to celebrate, and he wasn’t done jumping.”
Not even the gold medal was enough for the dark horse. The knight had won the tournament and gotten the girl, but his tale wasn’t over. The gladiator had dropped his mask and revealed himself to be the general who had won the air war.
“When you look at it, when you realize even Bubka only won one Olympic gold medal, it makes you realize how incredible this was,” Bemiller said. “Things might have been tough early in Tim’s career, but he got one chance, and he made the most of it. Even the greatest in the world couldn’t. The event beats you up, and add the politics, injuries, and everything else, and that he still came through, that’s what makes it so special. It’s magic, pure magic—this event and what Tim did.”
As he talked with his parents after his third miss at six meters, officials told Mack to hurry up and take his victory lap already. It was after midnight in Greece, and Mack didn’t even have time to put his spikes back on, so he ran it in his socks. As he turned to go, Cleghorn shoved a small Greek flag in his hand. Sometimes, Mack waved it. Sometimes, he let a large American flag stream behind him. He was Captain Midnight, running with the red, white and blue.
He wouldn’t remember doing so, but he actually ran one and a half laps. It was fitting. It had been such a big victory. The victory had never really been in the moment of 11:24 P.M., August 27. The victory was in all that went before that. The victory was created by everything Mack went through to get over that bar. He had provided the ultimate proof that it’s never too late, that a man must keep trying and never give up.
He had given every plodder wings. For the air is where the glories of the world are—in autumn leaves flung like gold doubloons from a treasure chest, in a hawk riding a thermal air current, and in Tim Mack’s summer of 2004.
Given how long he had waited, it was no surprise that he would have to wait a little longer before actually receiving his gold medal. The pole vault ended so late that the medal ceremony didn’t take place until the next evening. Mack spent the night celebrating, including attending a victory party at his parents’ hotel. There, he called together his parents and all his other relatives, as well as O’Hare and a couple of other members of the vaulting community.
“I couldn’t have done it without you,” Tim Mack said. “It wouldn’t have meant as much if you weren’t here.”
He left at 6 A.M. to take a blood test for doping control. First, though, Mack stopped by the Athletes’ Village where Upshaw was staying. “I only started to get to know her in May,” he said. “My big regret is that she wasn’t at the hotel. I had always been so focused, but now I had opened myself up a little more.”
At the Athletes’ Village, Mack text-messaged her. “U up?”
“Where r u?” she replied.
“Rite outside ur door,” he said.
Grace tiptoed outside to meet him. Both are world-class athletes and were mindful of disturbing sleepers who might be competing that day.
“He was still in his track singlet he had worn when he won, still in his socks, and, frankly, smelling a little bit of alcohol,” Upshaw said, laughing. “He had this great smile on his face, and I just jumped into his arms.”
They sat on the hallway floor, whispering.
“You won!” she said.
“I know,” he said.
“You’re the gold medalist!” she said.
“I was just trying to win a meet,” he said.
The whole, colossal quest for the grail was over, and Mack was still trying to grasp exactly how happy the ending was turning out to be.
“It’s amazing,” Mack said. “She is at the other end of the country, but we are making it work. I’m definitely not seeing her because it is convenient. It’s challenging. Every day I am with her, I’m learning about myself.”
“People say he is reserved,” said Upshaw. “But I think he is the most affectionate person. He’s always got his arm around me or touching me.”
The medal ceremony the next night was overshadowed by the final game of the star-crossed USA men’s Olympic basketball team, which defeated Lithuania for the bronze medal. By the time the ceremony started, Mack’s parents had finally found seats in Olympic Stadium, which didn’t necessarily mean they had found tickets.
“It was a real Keystone Cops comedy,” Tim’s mother said.
No one had thought to buy tickets for August 28, which was when the leftover medal ceremonies from the 27th would take place. Tim came up with four tickets, and “B” chipped in two, but the parents still didn’t have tickets for themselves. In desperation, Don Mack bought a pair from a scalper minutes before the gates opened. He and Arlene walked through Olympic Park, past the swimming and diving stadium, past the gymnastics hall where the Not-Quite-Dream Team played. At the gate to the track stadium, a ticket taker shook her head. Don Mack peered closely at what he had bought for the first time.
“They were for the platform diving finals!” Arlene Mack said.
“I was so glad I could buy tickets, I never even looked at them,” Don said.
“I could have killed him,” Arlene said.
Officials finally took pity on them and put the Macks in premium box seats for the medal ceremony.
Before Tim Mack emerged from the tunnel, he had a perfect view of the medal podium and the fans packed into their seats. “I guess it’s real after all,” he thought.
Athens had been the “Make-Nice” Olympics for the USA. Because of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, American fans and athletes had curbed the jingoism. Red, white, and blue attire was rare in the stands. Athletes listened to USOC lectures, urging them not to be sore winners.
“It wasn’t like wearing a military uniform in any sense,” Mack said, “but you still have a different sense of who you are and of what country you are from when you have ‘USA’ across your chest. There are 300 million people in the United States, and you’re representing all of them. All the time I was in Athens, I reflected on that. I walked with my head a little bit higher. But those feelings are tenfold more powerful when you walk out to get the gold medal.”
In this setting, Tim Mack—controlled, shuttered, his emotions clenched tight, almost down to the roots of his self-shorn hair—walked out and almost busted loose bawling.
Standing on the tallest step of the podium, flanked by Stevenson and Gibilisco, Mack, who had already been presented with an olive wreath by an attendant, dipped his head so that the distinguished IOC member from Ukraine, Sergey Bubka, could place the gold medal around his neck. When he did so, it almost looked as if he was making a reverent bow.
A moment later, he bit down on the medal, jokingly. Yep. It was genuine. No counterfeits on the victory podium.
When the American flag went up the pole and “The Star-Spangled Banner” began to play, Mack’s eyes blurred with tears. Twice, he choked down sobs with deep, ragged breaths.
The man in the iron mask let his guard down. The guy who broke everything down into its component parts, the figure filbert fiddling with his numbers—that guy got lost along the way, stunned by the enormity of what he had done.
“That was what got to me,” he said. “I thought about the road, the whole, long road, starting years ago, which led to the medal ceremony. I thought about what my parents must be feeling. I had been up forty-eight straight hours, and maybe that was part of it. Everything kind of slowed down. I wanted to stay in that moment.”
“I was zooming the video camera in on Tim’s face,” said O’Hare. “It was hard, because I had tears in my eyes. I turned around, and Grant had tears rolling down his cheeks.”
“I never saw that side of Tim. I thought that shell of his was going to break,” said Russ Johnson, watching at home on TV.
When the ceremony was over in Athens, Bubka approached Mack, seeking a commitment for his meet in Donetsk in 2005.
Mack had tried to emulate Bubka all his life, across the gulf of warring political ideologies and vast distances, connecting with him on the pure level of love of the sport. Now, in a way, Mack had become the man on the poster of his bedroom wall.
“When is the meet?” Mack asked.
“When would you like it to be?” Bubka said.