Word: poling
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...Monday, when Johnson and Perec won their respective 400s, Lewis the long jump and Allen Johnson the 110-m hurdles, Thursday evening at Olympic Stadium promised the fantastic. It was a night O'Brien had dreamed about for four years, ever since he no-heighted in the pole vault at the '92 Olympic trials. "Watching a competition you felt you could win," O'Brien said of the Barcelona Olympics, "was worse than getting picked last in gym class." This time around, O'Brien had no trouble with the pole vault. But he still had Frank Busemann, 21, of Germany...
...know a whole lot, for example, about Irina Scherbo, not a competitor but married to one, which is enough to make you a star in your own feature film. Irina, the wife of Belorussian Vitali Scherbo, who won six gold medals in the '92 Games, slammed into a telephone pole on her way to the hairdresser last December, splitting her BMW in two and winding up in a coma. Her husband quit training for months to keep vigil at her bedside, washing her hair, cutting her finger- and toenails. But as soon as Irina was on the mend, she insisted...
...calls it his "rags-to-riches" tale, but having happily embarked on the riches phase, he politely wishes that everyone else would please just move on too. The decathlete is tired of what has become his 11th event, talking about his previous failings--the way he mysteriously flubbed the pole vault in the 1992 Olympic trials, thereby blowing his star turn in Barcelona; the way his college partying sometimes got the best of him. But O'Brien understands too that the past exerts a pull and the future has not quite arrived...
...half of the catchy 1992 Reebok ad campaign, "Dan and Dave," in which America's two best and most photogenic decathletes, O'Brien and Dave Johnson, were pitted against each other in anticipation of an exciting Barcelona matchup. When, hobbled by poor preparation, O'Brien no-heighted in the pole vault during the Olympic trials, he became, perversely, even more famous. Johnson went on to take the bronze, while O'Brien was left to choke down his embarrassment on the sidelines and serve as a track-and-field commentator for NBC in Barcelona, a task he took on with characteristic...
This time around, at the June Olympic trials, O'Brien had no problem with the pole vault, soaring to a height of 17 ft. 3/4 in., and despite less-than-par performances in the long jump and the 1,500 m, he finished first on the U.S. team, with 90 points to spare. This, say his coaches, is as it should be. "We don't even talk about losing," says Rick Sloan, who has coached O'Brien in the field events for the past six years. "People want him to get all excited about making the team, about getting that...