PoleVaultPower.com

advath wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VVYc2o_9K0

Thanks for the old video footage. That was quite a pit you had back then.

Thanks to Neovault, here is a jump of Mike Tully making 19’0” by 4-6 inches in 1988 looking great. Mike was an incredible pole vaulter who held the world record indoors 18’5” Detroit, Cobo Hall and outdoors 18’8 3/4 Corvallis, OR while in college at UCLA in 1978. I wonder if we will ever see that again. If I recall, Mike was not extremely fast, but had an incredible run, plant, take off, very efficient on the pole and most important had no fear.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA7Dapjs ... er&list=UL

hey

great shot...

nice takeoff?? very little bend in the pole even when he was about a foot off the ground...

Mike was maybe the best "swing' vaulter ever... with a takeoff like this and with the run that we tried to develop prior to 1984 on to 1988.. he had 20 foot potential.

thanks for the vid..

also.. great stuff tim.. love it

dj

Looks like a tail gail!! Name the vaulter kneeling in the red adidas warmups at the back of the runway as Mike starts his approach.
P.S. Mike was a great vaulter!

One other possible note of interest. That jump of Mike was at UCLA and the pit and standards at that time were one of a kind. I was working for Ampro Corp. i.e. PortaPit/CataPole at that time and the president of the company refused to make 21'6" wide pits with the cut outs for the standards. He thought they would be a law suit waiting to happen so we only made pits that were 16'6" wide. Obviously a very shortsighted and wrong conclusion that contributed to the demise of that company along with a number of other poor decisions. Any way the interesting thing about the pit and standards used in the video of Mike is that it is in fact a 21'6" wide pit, UCLA wanted a new pit and we wanted to supply the pit for them and they required that it be a 21'6" wide pit so we delivered a 21'6" wide pit to them. I had to design a pit that had a very minimal space covered by the pit and top pad where the base of the standards could slide under the pit. That way if the athlete landed there it would be that same as landing in the middle of the pit, so we designed this as sort of a bridge over that area with only 4 or 6 inches of space to slide the standard base under. this made us develop a standard that had basically 4' off sets instead of the normal 2' off sets that all standards have. Well the physics of that added lever arm on the uprights of the standards caused many problems and made for some standards that had to be beefed up way to much and thus were hard to move up and down and forward and back. All in all a very expensive and unmanageable solution to what turned out to be a non-problem. If you look close you can see that there are no cut outs for the standards and the extra long off-sets on the standards holding up the crossbar. LOL!!!
Vault On