Up, Up And Away

Coach Bill McCurdy calls it "the flakiest sport in track." Participants claim that it is both the most mental and most technical field event. It's certainly the most dangerous.

Pole vaulters, catapult the human body through the air, often achieving altitudes that are three times their own height.

The Harvard pole vaulting corps--Dave Randall, Dolf Berle and Gus Spanos--are a small and diverse group. Each vaulter started for a different reason and is at a different point in his vaulting career. Yet they have two things in common: a slightly reckless streak and a love for the excitement pole vaulting provides.

Persuasion

"It's one of the scariest things you can do," freshman Berie explained. "But there are not many thrills that surpass going over a new height. Once you've ever the bar, it's like flying and you have all that hang time to contemplate your achievement."

Unlike football and baseball, pole vaulting is certainly not the kind of sport that you pack up from the kids down the block. How and why would one begin? There is no common path.

Track co-captain Randull started vaulting to combat boredom when he was ten years old and living in Ghana. Randall and his older brother used bamboo sticks and buried themselves over neights of four and five feet. This sybling competition soon moved from rivalry to ritual and when his family moved to Newton, Mass., Randall joined the Newton North track team to begin supervised vaulting.

When he entered high school, Randall was vaulting around ten feet, but during his sophomore year, he experimented with gymnastics, helping his leaping tremendously. The next year, he catapulted himself over four feet higher to the Massachusetts Schoolboy Championship.

Euthanasia

In contrast to Randall's obscure vaulting origins. Berle began vaulting this year because he wanted to compete in the decathalon and the pole vault is one of the events. Sophomore Spanos took the utilitarian rouse his freshman year of high school.

"I wasn't especially fast or big so I narrowed the events in which I could participate to three: the high jump, the javelin, and the pole vault," Spanos said. "I thought it [pole valuting] looked ridiculous but one of my friends was doing it, so I gave it a shot. Seven feet was the first height I cleared. It seemed like a mile."

Danger is an integral part of vaulting and the possibility of injury is always in the back of a vaulter's mind. There are over 100 different steps involved in a single vault, and a slip up in any one of these motions could spell disaster. The greatest threat to the vaulter is that be won't quite make it over the bar and will return from whence he came, as they say. The floor on which he makes his approach is hard and there are no pads to cushion his fall.

Pole breaking provides another worry. "When I was a sophomore in high school, at a California Invitational meet, one vaulter was in mid-air and upside down when his pole broke. The kid landed on his head right on the concrete where you place your pole," Spanos recalled.

None of the Crimson catapulters have ever seriously injured themselves though Berle once found himself stuck on the bar, with one leg on one side and his second leg on the other, and Randall earlier this season hurt his heel when his foot missed the landing pad.

The Catch-22 is that in order to vault to greater heights you must take a chance--move your hand a bit lower on the pole, or speed up your approach--but too much doring can be fatal. It's that dynamic tension of risk and cautiousness that every vaulter strives for.

"You have to be reckless but you can't leave yourself to complete abandon," Randall said. "I learned that it's better to vault cautiously than act to vault at all."

Destpite the tremendous risk involved none of the Crimson cotspulters would ever consider quitting. Berle described it best: "You defy your instinct and gravity but one you go over that first time you just can't quit. It's addictive.