Jason Wurster goes for Gold at Pan Am Games

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On a pole and a prayer

Niagara’s Wurster goes for Gold at Pan Am Games


On a pole and a prayer. Jason Wurster, who hails from Stevensville, will compete in the men’s pole vault during the 2011 Pan Am Games in Guadalajara, Mexico, this Friday at 3:30 p.m. Edwin Tam
The dust particles slowly built up on the tip of young Jason Wurster’s index finger.
On a dusty television screen in the heart of Chippawa in the 1980s, Wurster plopped down and watched his fictional heroes gambit through a dangerous laser hallway.
Wurster would trace clean lines through a thin layer of dust to outline crisp red laser beams on the glowing box.
Fast forward two decades and Wurster is doing something similar to his childhood heroes: avoiding a bar as one of Canada’s top pole vaulters.
On Friday, Wurster, 27, will vault himself up as an ordinary Canadian athlete, but he’s hoping to come down a champion.
He is the lone Canadian competing in the men’s pole vault event at the 2011 Pan American Games in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Wurster’s personal best height is 5.50 metres — the equivalent of a two-storey building — in both indoor and outdoor pole vault.
“Jason’s got a Canadian record in him,” said coach George Krupa, 61. “If you’ve ever seen him jump, you know he’s always snapping or breaking poles. They bend 90 degrees, but he’s bending them like crazy. The faster you are, the higher you jump. It’s an extreme sport.”
Written on an old garage on Krupa’s property in Stevensville are the names of 30 pole vaulters, including nine provincial-winning high school athletes, listed in order of their highest jumps. Wurster’s name remains at the top of the list.
“It took a while to get the hockey out of him, but when he finally got into pole vaulting he became a machine,” said Krupa. “Around here, kids are hockey players first and as they grow up they wonder what pole vault is all about.”
Wurster believed he would grow up to become a hockey player. He pulled on his first pair of skates when he was four years old and didn’t give up the game until he was 17. When he moved from Chippawa to Stevensville at age 10 he continued competing in the Niagara Falls hockey system, but found himself spending more time playing shinny on a frozen pond in Krupa’s backyard like so many Fort Erie youngsters do to this day.
The pond was the hot spot during the winter, but when summer rolled in, Krupa dusted off his track and field equipment out of the garage.
“One day after school in Grade 9 while training for high jump with (Niagara Regional Athletics coach) Kevin Knight, I became so frustrated because I was afraid to land on my back on the high jump bar,” recalled Wurster. “I didn’t have much time before the high school Zone qualifier, yet I had to find an event that I was better at. I decided to give pole vault a try.”
Over the next couple of nights, Wurster was pole vaulting over a bungee and landing on the big dusty mats in Krupa’s backyard. At his first meet competing in the pole vault event, Wurster advanced to the Southern Ontario Secondary Schools Association track and field meet and suddenly his quick success snowballed into a trend. He roared to the top at regionals and soon found himself at the Ontario Federation of School Athletic Associations track and field championships.
“Something happened at OFSAA, I made three personal bests and ended up in second place,” said Wurster. “From that day I decided that I would be a pole vaulter.”
Earlier this year at the 2011 Canadian track-and-field championship, Wurster defended his title by winning gold with a jump of 5.25 metres. Wurster, who has also represented Canada with a ninth-place finish in China at the 26th Summer Universiade in August, won a bronze medal at the Pan Am junior championships in 2003.
Wurster recently graduated from the University of Toronto and now trains with the York University Track Club.
“Pole vaulting is a challenge, and it evokes a lot of adrenaline. With hockey you can be tired and know that it isn’t the end of the world as there are five other guys on the ice that can get you out of trouble if you make a mistake,” said Wurster, who stands six-foot and weighs 180 pounds. “With pole vaulting you are on your own, and however much you put into it is what you are going to get out.”
Wurster sacrificed a lot in high school to pole vault, including being unable to spend as much time with his friends as he would have liked.
“But I think being so involved in track and field kept me out of trouble,” he said. “Now, I’ve moved an hour and a half away from my family to pole vault. I wish I could have both, live in Stevensville and be an elite athlete, but in my sport, Toronto is where the facilities are. I only have a small window in my life. Where I can really push the limits as to how high I can go.”