Steve Christlaw: Region’s jumpers, vaulters set high standard

There are some track-and-field events a normal person can picture doing.

Reality and a pulled hamstring or two intervene pretty quickly, but the imagination can still get you around the track in record time.

And if all you go by is your own imagination, you look really good while you’re doing it.

In the alternate universe created by my own imagination, I picture myself running the hurdles. Personally, I blame the all-time great, Olympic champion Renaldo Nehemiah, who not only set records and dominated the sport but made it look positively elegant in the process.

But even my imagination, which can conjure just about anything, cannot picture myself jumping backward over a bar set higher than my head. And it refuses to acknowledge a reality in which I use a pole to get over anything wider than a creek bed in the dry season.

Thankfully, we have a host of local talent at both of those events and I’m happy to simply observe and appreciate their efforts.

I still remember the debate over the revolutionary work of Dick Fosbury. The Fosbury Flop, eschewing the conventional wisdom of going over the bar face down, set the sport on its ear.

Some have called his approach “out-of-the-box thinking.”

Putting bananas on a peanut butter sandwich is out-of-the-box thinking. Sprinkling crushed red pepper flakes on vanilla ice cream is out-of-the-box thinking. Letting Tom Cruise play Jack Reacher in the movies is, well, that’s not out-of-the-box thinking – that’s just plain wrong.

Turning high jump convention upside down, backward and on its ear, was more than that. It was just plan crazy.

But the Fosbury Flop propelled the high jump to greater and greater heights. The sport was straining to improve much over 7 feet until the Oregon jumper came along. Today, the world record is over 8 feet.

Much later on, I had the chance to talk with Central Valley legend Bob Keppel, who jumped against Fosbury during his time at Washington State. A highly successful traditionalist and one of the first Spokane high jumpers to clear 7 feet, Keppel is proud of the fact that he never lost a collegiate meet to Fosbury.

Keppel also did a great job apprehending serial killers.

Of course, until 1968, when he won the NCAA championship and qualified for the Mexico City Olympic Games, Fosbury wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire with his new approach. His local newspaper even called him “the world’s laziest high jumper.”

And then he cleared 7 feet, 4¼ inches to set the Olympic record by jumping off the “wrong foot” and going over the bar backward. That jump ushered in the modern era in the event.

Watching high jumpers is something that always makes me stop and admire. It’s elegant in its own way.

The pole vault, on the other hand, still leaves me mystified.

It was a long time before I was able to mentally reconcile the fact that many high school vaulters were, well, compact, and the very best in the world are tall and lanky.

And then a high school coach explained it to me.

To be a pole vaulter you have to be comfortable going upside down, and that’s not something athletes normally do. So, the coach said, they go out and recruit wrestlers and gymnasts – athletes who are comfortable being inverted – to take up the sport.

In my mind, University High School produced the prototypical pole vaulter, even if his own event coach, U-Hi legend Reg Hulbert, once told him to go off and become a distance runner – he was too smart to be pole vaulter.

“We like our pole vaulters to be kind of stupid because they have to be crazy, you know?” he said in an interview.

Brad Walker was anything but stupid. In fact, he was a 4.0 student and an even greater student of pole vaulting. A former two-time Pac-10 champion as a Washington Husky and a two-time Olympian who set the United States record at 19-¾, he’s now an assistant track coach at Washington State.

But he’s not the school record holder in the event at U-Hi – by 13 inches, in fact.

Tyson Byers, his former teammate, broke Walker’s 16-foot school record by clearing 17-1 – winning the state championship by clearing a record 17-0.

Having a rich local history in the pole vault is the foundation for my admiration for the sport.

And that rich Northwest history added a new chapter recently.

Olivia Gruver cleared 15-6¼ at the Stanford Invitational, smashing the University of Washington women’s record by more than a foot and set the collegiate outdoor pole-vaulting record by a centimeter.

Gruver, a transfer from the University of Kentucky, is gunning to become the first woman to win three straight NCAA titles, but more than that, she’s aiming to clear 16 feet.

She would be the 10th woman to clear that height and the third U.S. athlete to clear that height.

The world record is 16-7¼, set by Yelena Isinbaeva of Russia.

When it comes to hurling yourself skyward to get over a precariously perched bar, that’s rarified air.

But it’s rarified air we up here in the left-hand corner of the country have pioneered.

And that, too, is unimaginable.