PoleVaultPower.com

With all the prolific posters on this message board, I have a feeling that we can come up with a great collection of pole vaulting stories. I’m heading out of town for a week and can’t wait to get back to see what has been posted!

I had received this e-mail from the mom of Jodie Mayes on 3-27-02
about Jodie’s first Junior High outdoor meet of the year. I have posted the
message previously on the Yahoo group of Pole Vaulters get High.
However, I got such a chuckle from the story that I thought that is worth repeating.

Hope everyone enjoys the story as much as I did!

Anyway, her first Jr. High meet was yesterday......30 something
degrees by the time she jumped. She jumped 11'.....second place was
6'. THERE WAS ICE ON THE PIT!!!!!! Her coach couldn't believe she
could jump that with it being so cold. She also finished 1st in Long
Jump, 1st in 4X100, 2nd in Hurdles (after clipping the ninth hurdle,
tangling up with it, doing a roll on the ground and getting up and
jumping the last hurdle!), and 3rd in the 100m and 1st in PV. She got
high point for the meet with 36 1/2 points and her team won by 30
points! She then went to a make-up session for cheerleading tryouts
until 11:15pm. I am TRYING to get her out of bed now. HA HA

All the Fayetteville vaulters wore the helmets yesterday (from 2
different Jr. Highs). I had one parent who is a friend of mine whose
daughter goes to a different school ask me why their kids weren't
wearing helmets and wanted to know if her daughter could borrow
Jodie's. I am sure that there were several parents wondering that.
The next step is the High School meet on Thursday. With them all
wearing so many layers of clothes yesterday because of the
cold....they looked like bobsledders! ha ha ha

Oh and by the way.....9th grade boys PV was won with 8'6" and 8th
grade boys was won with 7'.....I don't think the boys would've wanted
Jodie to jump with them since she jumped 11'...again I say WITH ICE
ON THE PIT!!!! Jodie said that some people were kind of laughing at
their helmets....until she put one on and started jumping....

That is awesomely hilarious!

My freshman year of college i was practicing blew through some pole and decide to try a new pole i went and got a 15' 165 consider i weigh 130 this pole is brand spankin new no scuff or cracks at all. first jump on it clear 16' easy. next one clear 5m. third jump bang it breaks and a three foot piece of it lands acroos the street from the track on a ladies front porch. Damn those spirits.

I think I heard this story from pat manson a couple of years ago at the summit. That or Don Hood senior told me. This pro vaulter had just come back from a meet in Europe and he was rather groggy. He picked up his poles and proceeded to leave the airport. He stepped on the escilator with the oples on his shoulder and he did not notice that the escilator had tucked in right behind his poles. The groggy vaulter also failed to notice the wall above the escilator before reaching the ceiling level of the lower floor. His pole tube broke through the dry wall and hit an I beam. Since the escilator had tucked in on the other side of his poles they were pushing them into the I beam. The newly aware vaulter shouted, "Everybody Run!!" The whole tube shattered. Rumor has it that the groggy vaulter was Joe Dial.

Jodie worked with Joe Dial last night and so we asked him about it...he said he wasn't the one...but he thought it was pretty funny

A girl (I believe she was from Oregon) entered the Young Women’s competition clearing the bar, but landing at the very back of the pit. Each time the bar was raised, she would struggle a bit, but eventually clear it. And, with each clearance, she would land a little closer toward the front of the pit. She was still vaulting when there were only two competitors left.

Right before her third attempt , she was off the back end of the runway where Leila Ben-Youssef was talking with her. From Leila’s “body languageâ€Â

When Chelsea Johnson won the Mt. SAC Relays at 13-4, (http://www.dyestat.com/us/2out/mtsac/r-54.htm) I was a bit skeptical about her having vaulted for less than one year. Especially since I am a proud owner of the SKY SYSTEM TWO tape which provides an idea of all the pole vaulting equipment that is in her father’s back yard. However, I ran across a great article which had appeared in USA TODAY which convinced me that she has indeed only been vaulting for a short period of time.

Chelsea Johnson, with UCLA, will surely be a vaulter to watch this year!

Here’s the newspaper article By Ray Glier, special for USA TODAY 5/16/02:
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/preps/st ... -vault.htm

Chelsea Johnson's backyard in Atascadero, Calif., is a mecca for pole vaulters. Competitors show up from around the USA to work out in the four pits set up by her father, Jan, the 1972 Olympic bronze medalist in the event.

It seemed odd to everyone, except Chelsea, that she didn't jump into the sport.

"It wasn't my thing," she says. "It was my dad's thing. I was too busy playing soccer or (hurdling)."

Then, in January, Johnson decided she would get serious.

The 18-year-old senior at Atascadero High has been to just 15 meets, but she is the nation's top high school girls pole vaulter at 13 feet, 4 inches. She also has earned a track scholarship to UCLA and is making a bid for the U.S. junior national team.

"I decided to give it a try for a month and see if I liked it," she says.

Johnson says her father never pushed her but always told her to let him know when she was ready to give the sport a try.

"He saw the potential, I didn't, and I think that was kind of hard for him," Johnson says. "When I started doing well, he was very excited. My whole life people have asked me, 'Why don't you pole vault?' I don't regret not taking it up sooner. I think soccer and the hurdles have made me much stronger physically and prepared me very well for pole vault."

Johnson hasn't had any discouraging moments since she began vaulting, not even with the three recent deaths related to the sport, where competitors missed the landing cushion and hit pavement.

"I don't think helmets are necessary if you know what you are doing and the coach knows what they are doing," Johnson says. "Pole vaulting is an extremely safe sport. I don't have a fear of landing on my head; my dad is not going to put me in unsafe situations. I think soccer is more dangerous."


And here are some great pictures from Dyestat of Chelsea at the 2002 California State meet:
http://www.dyestat.com/state/ca/2out/statemeet/r-54.htm

I believe that Lindsey would want you to remember her story and for you to do everything possible to avoid her type of gut-wrenching experience during a state qualification meet.

From the Joplin Globe, May 16, 2001
By Craig Hull
http://www.joplinglobe.com/archives/200 ... tory5.html

As a two-time state defending champion, it was not supposed to end like it did for Lindsey Bourne.

Granted, nothing is completely through for the Joplin High School senior who will continue her career at the University of Oklahoma.

But on Saturday, at the Class 4A district meet at JFK Stadium, Bourne’s prep pole vault career ended in a way that no one predicted â€â€

Here is a very interesting article entitled “Coach Dave Nielsenâ€Â

well, i have a few stories. my coach dug out this really (and i mean REALLY) old brown pole. i think it was like a 14 footer w/ crusty brown paint that was peeling off and it must have been for about 200 lbs or so. anyways...he tells me and the other 3 vaulters at my school that he just found this thing (and that it's probably older than most of us) and how surprised he was that the school even owned an antique like this. One of my dumb teamates (cough cough nick) dared our other guy vaulter to try and vault on the old peice of junk just for the heck of it (and he did this while coach wasn't there). so my other dumb teamate decides to take the dare. baaad idea. he ended up totaly straddling the old brown pole, going up about 10 feet, and then landing just like that on the mat! he couldn't walk or move off the mat for like 20 mins. and when he finally did get up, he walked splay legged/ cowboy style for the rest of practice. now it's this big joke between all of us because when coach came back, he took one look at the guy and said "he rode the brown pony! YEEHAAAW!" so now whenver someone straddles their pole, we say "they rode it".


my second story....
oh geez, when i first started vaulting my coach used to have to hold onto the lower part of the pole and help me get some "air" so that i would know what it felt like (this is like the 3rd day of practice). ne ways, the next day i had decided that i wanted to try it w/out help just to get a feel for it and so my coach let me. i ended up pulling the pole sraight into my face, full force into my nose, (right after take-off) instead of going to the side of the pole. i had a bloody nose and a sore one too after that. now that i think about it, there are a lot of funny things that happened when i first started vaulting, because i knew so little about it. lol. for example at my first invitational, my coach had failed to inform me about standards so when the director asked me what my standards where i said " oh, whatever opening height is". lol. i was such a dummie! anyone else have funny stories about when they 1st started vaulting??