Friday, Jul 4, 2008
On the night when the greatest middle-distance runner in the world wept tears of joy after finally winning gold, two Russian women staged a pole vault battle for the ages.
Aug 25, 2004 | Most Olympic events have some tenuous connection with a useful human activity. Running fast and jumping far need no explanation, but even the more apparently gratuitous sports could come in handy. Being good at water polo, for example, would be a plus if a gang of thugs in bathing suits suddenly jumped into your swimming pool and tried to make off with your pool toys. Curling, with its mysterious frenetic ice- sweeping, could be valuable preparation for those planning to become Eskimo housewives. And knowing how to fence would be invaluable should you be a loudmouthed, adulterous scoundrel who somehow found himself in early 19th century Heidelberg.
But the pole vault? Who first dreamed that up? Some addled medieval military strategist, hoping to send a phalanx of unfortunate warriors flying over the enemy's castle walls? A manufacturer of 15-foot-long wooden sticks, trying to grow his business? No explanation seems to make sense: The pole vault, like the ski jump, is apparently just one of those sports that exists for its own sake. And that makes it all the more marvelous.
I'd seen pole vaulting in Sydney, when American woman vaulter Stacy Dragila won the gold, but I was on the wrong side of the stadium and it was a little hard to stay involved. One thing that people who have only seen the big Olympic track and field events on television may not realize is how chaotic and hard to follow things can be when you're actually there. This is partly because of the size of the stadiums (huge), but also because many events happen at the same time. This leads to strange juxtapositions, and double dramas unfolding simultaneously. For example, last night's glamour event was the men's 1,500 meters, in which Morocco's Hicham el-Guerrouj, a four-time world champion and perhaps the greatest middle-distance runner of all time, was trying to end his Olympic nightmare: El-Guerrouj has lost only four times in eight years, but two of those were at the last two Olympics. Going in, if you had told me that I would take my eyes off that race for one of the 214.18 seconds it took to run it, I would have laughed. But I was so deeply engrossed in the drama unfolding in front of me that I had to turn away from the el-Guerrouj saga for a few seconds.
The drama was the women's pole vault final, and it came down to a three-way duel between Russia's Yelena Isinbayeva, Russia's Svetlana Feofanova and Poland's Anna Rogowska. In a shocking development, defending Olympic champion Dragila, who later blamed too-tight shoes for giving her problems with her Achilles tendon, did not even qualify, failing to get over a rudimentary 4.40 meters. Her debacle took place on the far side of the stadium Friday night, unnoticed by the crowd. I realized she had gone out, but I was watching something else and didn't see her final miss, or her reaction. The huge, buzzing stadium resounds with blazoned deeds, with joy and heroism, but at the same time it is filled with invisible heartbreak, enormous personal losses that go unseen, like the tiny figure of Icarus plunging into the distant sea in Breughel's happy pastoral painting. This is one of the many ways in which neither the Olympics, nor human beings, have changed.
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