Word: vault
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...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...
...team to silver in the boycotted 1984 games. "To win in Barcelona would have been marvelous. To do it at home is oh, so sweet." The gold seemed like a sure thing for the Americans until the final event, when 14-year-old Dominique Moceanu fell on consecutive vaults. Then up stepped Kerri Strug, who was the 14-year-old baby of the 1992 team. After injuring her ankle when she missed her first vault attempt, Strug took the long walk back down the runway, with the crowd roaring its support. Strug then calmly sprinted down the runway, cartwheeled onto...
...yeoman, people are apt to do strange things. Things one wouldn't expect them to do. Things one might call downright ... unnatural. Like the three frat brothers who wrench their gaze away from the bikini-clad strumpets draped over the first-deck seats to train their binoculars on the vault pit. Or the women heading for the video monitor, who have just abandoned places in the rest-room line they have been holding for 30 minutes. Or the enterprising youngsters pelting spectators with hot-dog parts, who have suddenly adopted an air of near religious quiescence. Indeed, the entire stadium...
...Cynics take note: each of those minor increments triggers a lucrative bonus of as much as $50,000 from meet promoters and equipment sponsors. The parsimonious control with which Bubka seems to measure out these achievements has raised eyebrows among purists, who suspect he may have turned the pole vault into a kind of personal cash machine by slicing the bonus bacon with such exquisite thinness...
...view his motives as purely pecuniary, one must also dismiss how astonishingly difficult the vault is, even for a master like Bubka. This is not always easy to appreciate, perhaps because there is something deceptively buoyant and elastic about the way a vault appears to unfold on TV. But to see it from 50 ft. away is to understand that the vault is a brutish thing. The poles, especially the ones Bubka uses, are as stiff as lampposts, and their throat-catching bend is the product of extraordinary speed and gristle. Bubka's virtue, or one of them, anyway...