The Ukrainian former athlete Sergey Bubka is a living legend in athletics. For 10 years, he utterly dominated pole vaulting. In that period he broke 35t world records mostly his own. In Seoul 1988, Bubka had his first opportunity to shine in the Olympic Games, having stayed out of Los…
By 1988, Sergey Bubka was the greatest vaulter in the world, and possibly the best of all-time, rivaled only by Cornelius “Dutch” Warmerdam, who never got to compete at the Olympics. Bubka had won the 1983 and 1987 World Championships, the 1986 European Championships, had set nine world records (outdoors), and was…
Sergey Bubka, the most dominant pole vaulter in history, might have expected to win gold medals at five successive Olympic Games. The story of his achieving the feat only once is a modern fable of how the best-laid schemes of mice and pole vaulters can go awry. Nothing speaks more…
