Word: vault
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...Frenchmen and two Americans argued it out in the last stages of " the pole vault. Only Mike Tully of the U.S. deigned to try at 18 ft. 6½ in. and casually cleared. Pierre Quinon of France went over comfortably at 18 ft. 8¼ in., while Countryman Thierry Vigneron and the other American, Earl Bell, fell out. Tully passed. Again on the first vault, Quinon surmounted 18 ft. 10¼ in. Tully passed once more. But they both failed the next height, and therefore Quinon, 22, won. "I am young and learning," he said, "perhaps how to lose mostly...
Then, in the pole vault, Hingsen nearly succumbed to the decathlete's nightmare: disqualification for not making height. Before vaulting, he had thrown up twice, and on his first two tries at 14 ft. 9 in. he looked like a clumsy fledgling. On his third effort he cleared it by a whisker, but that was as high as he went. Under the point system, each inch in the vault is worth about 6 points, making it a disproportionately weighted event. So with Hingsen grounded, Thompson rose for the kill. When he cleared 16 ft. 4¾ in., he delightedly...
Retton, by contrast, is a 4-ft. 9-in. study in power, able to leap tall buildings with a single bound and do a full-twisting layout double Tsukahara (a maneuver only a few men in the world can perform) while she is at it. On the vault, she earned a 10 with that trick, which calls for pouncing onto the vault, then pushing into the stratosphere with her arms and twisting 360° while doing a double somersault with her body perfectly straight...
...layout double back somersault, and exploded into a dazzling smile. It did not dim for the rest of her routine. When she landed her final twisting somersault, she had notched a 10. Szabo did not give any ground, however. She went out with solid 9.90s on the vault and, finally, the uneven bars...
...came down to Retton on the vault in the final event. As she waited her turn, her personal coach, Bela Karolyi, leaned across the photographers' barricade from his seat in the stands and showed her a piece of paper on which the arithmetic had been done: score a 9.95 to tie Szabo for the gold, score a 10 to stand alone as all-around champion. Anything less would mean the silver. He bent down to hold and shake her shoulders; she nodded intensely...