Hometown Not What It Used To Be For Bubka

Home isn’t what it used to be.

Sergei Bubka can’t help but notice during his brief visits. His apartment on the 13th floor of the high-rise building is out of harm’s way. But down below on “The Avenue Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the USSR,” there is often madness in the streets of Donetsk, Ukraine. Just recently, Bubka had an extra brick wall built in the hallway, and he installed a thick, steel door with heavy, dead-bolt locks.

His mother, Maria, and his brother, Juri, live there alone now, and Bubka’s visits have become less and less frequent.

“You have to hurry, no matter what you are doing,” he said. “So far, I have run across no trouble in Donetsk. But you never know. You must always stay alert and stay careful. Today in my country, it seems like anybody will do anything at all for money. So much has changed.”

Everything, that is, except Bubka, who for more than a decade has cast a giant shadow over the pole vault and the World Track and Field Championships like no one else. He’s the only athlete to have won individual gold medals in each of the first four world title meets, dating back to 1983 at Helsinki.

Go back to 1983 and Carl Lewis had yet to step onto the throne as the king of track. Joe Montana had won only one Super Bowl. Hakeem Olajuwon and Michael Jordan were still in college. Yet Bubka was already on top in the pole vault, on his way to breaking the world record 35 times.

Now, more than a decade later, Bubka remains the favorite to win another gold medal. It is the rest of his world that has changed.

Four years ago, Bubka he boarded a plane bound for the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo and disembarked some 6 hours later to the news that then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was under house arrest in Crimea. The nation and the sports system in which Bubka grew up began to crumble.

Back then, he spoke tentatively about his hopes for democracy in what would soon become individual republics of the former USSR and fantasized about a day when he could return home to live happily in Donetsk. That day has not come.

His home and his family are in Monte Carlo, where Bubka can park his Mercedes-Benz and his Ferrari out on the street without fear of theft or vandalism. On those rare visits to Donetsk, he must get extra security, even in broad daylight, for his Pontiac or his tiny Volga.

Yet for all of the added hassles, Bubka longs to return to his native land.

“My real home is in Donetsk,” he said. “There is where I have my mother, my brother and all of my longtime friends. They speak my language, and they are my people.”

Bubka is no longer one of them, however. Not with his seven-figure annual income on the track circuit and assorted endorsement contracts. What all of that money makes Bubka now in his hometown is juicy prey in a society that has collapsed and a country that is in search of itself. In the old days, friends told him he was being used by the old Soviet system that siphoned off most of his earnings. Now those same friends are jealous of all the money he gets to keep.

In Ukraine today, Bubka says, there is little thought given to making a better future. There is only an overwhelming sense of lawlessness. Anything goes.

“When I return to Donetsk I notice the differences. The houses are worn, the roads are bad, the city is filthy and the spirit of service not at all what I’m used to in the West,” Bubka said. “But I still feel a change in my soul. It was in Donetsk that I grew up to become the athlete that I am today. It was in Donetsk that I was married and went through an important period of my life. Home is still home.”

Just not the way it used to be.