About jumping high

How high is a high jump? First Wife Iris and I got into a discussion of that subject over breakfast newspaper last Sunday. Told her there were now guys regularly soaring close to 8 feet, the height of our ceiling. She didn't believe that so I ended up looking in the World Almanac.

Last weekend track meets on the local field produced outstanding performance by several high school athletes. A headline-making effort was a young man from Libby who hit a personal best in the high jump of 6'6". Thinks he can top 6'7" as the season warms up.

He said he was pushed to that attitude by a valley competitor who hit 6'5". To a "very mature" person like me, high school boys jumping that high are flabbergasting, and I'm sure you folks of two generations back know why.

When we were in high school in the forties, the Olympic record for leaping into the air over a bar was 6'8" set by Cornelius Johnson of the United States in 1936. Got that? Six feet six inches was the world record, exactly the height hit by a Montana kid from Libby last week.

Before 1964, the accepted historical way to jump was to run at the bar from the side and launch yourself into "the western roll," clearing the bar with your belly. That all went out the window in 1968 when a young man from the USA won the gold medal by flipping himself over the bar backward. Sports fans at first thought the poor guy was a little nutty, but changed their minds when he cleared 7'4 1/2". The Fosbury flop has caused the records to go up ever since. Stefen Holm of Sweden got the Olympic gold in 2004 by clearing 7'8 3/4", and the world record as of last year stood at 8'1/2", set by Javier Sotomayor from Cuba. He won a 1993 meet in Spain with that unbelievable jump. Track and field fans will be watching the Olympics in China this summer to see if anyone can came close to that but with the polluted air… probably not.

Another track record we were assured in the forties would NEVER be achieved by a human being was the four-minute mile. Wrong! Top high schoolers are hovering 15 to 20 seconds over that, but the world record now stands at 3 minutes, 43.13 seconds, set by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco in 1999 at Berlin, Germany.

Of course, the new flexible pole vault pole caused records to fall in the last generation. High schoolers nowadays are breaking the pre-war world records all the time.

Was listening to a "Fibber McGee and Molly" show on radio back in the thirties. Some fella asked Fibber if he had heard about the new pole vault record. Fibber replied, "Oh sure, but he would have never made it without that big stick."

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G. George Ostrom is a Kalispell resident and Hungry Horse News columnist.