2010 Club Altius Season's Greeter

[rainbowgirl28]

http://www.clubaltius.com/ - Click on Events

Dec 17-18, 2010

Granbury, Texas

Click on the link for more details!

[Erica]

April and I look forward to hosting the clinic on December 17th. Don't wait, sign up today!

[rainbowgirl28]

I hear it's shaping up to be a great event! Don't forget to register early 3 pits this year

[Bubba PV]

Looking forward to this great meet. I'm hearing three very fast runways this year. Please get entered so they can finalize the heats. See you soon. Bubba

[PV Official]

http://rise.espn.go.com/track-and-xc/us ... TrackAndXC

Bob Richards - Hero Out of the Past
Olympic gold medalist captivates crowd at Club Altius Season Greeter
Club Altius Season Greeter index page




Photo by: Donna Dye
Sign outside Granbury, Texas.
Granbury (Texas) is 75 miles from Dallas Fort Worth airport and a hundred years from today. It's slogan is, "Where Texas History Lives." Downtown is a square with an old charcoal gray courthouse with a clock tower that still dominates the countryside. The courthouse is surrounded by four blocks of covered sidewalks in front of quaint shops and restaurants. Of course there is an Opera House. Take away the cars and wire fence for the courthouse rehabilitation project and you have a perfect stage set of Victorian era Texas.

The pavilion at Granbury High School is a practice facility for the king of sport in these parts -- high school football. The wall to wall carpeting is marked out with yard markers from goal line to 30 yard line.

On a crisp Saturday morning in December, the pavilion was taken over by high school pole vaulters at the Club Altius Season Greeter meet. Several hundred vaulters, coaches, family and friends unfastened their poles from atop pickup trucks and SUV's still covered with frost and set up camp for the day.

Three pole vault pits lined the walls in a U-shape. The center was a sea of poles, back packs, lawn chairs and people ready for 12 hours of pole vaulting.

Into the arena walks a wizened old man with a Willie Nelson look.

"I'm 84 going on 85," he said, and proceeded to hold court for 2 hours. Before he could sit down, a stream of men came up to shake his hand and say, "Bob, I'm _____, remember when ____?"

"Bob" is Bob Richards, an athletic hero from so long ago that today's teens and even young adults in the crowd might not know about him.

Here are some of Richards' accomplishments:

•Second man to clear 15 feet in pole vault (Cornelius Warmerdam). This was an era of stiff poles before fiberglass poles started catapulting vaulters higher and higher.
•Only man in history with two Olympic gold medals in pole vault (1952 and 1956, plus a bronze in 1948)
•Three time US decathlon champion, 13th in the Olympics in 1956.
•Winner of the Millrose Games pole vault 11 straight years
•First athlete to appear on the front of the Wheaties cereal box
•An ordained minister when he was 20 years old
•A founder of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes
•Father of four pole vaulters including Brandon, who held the national high school record at 18-2 in the 1980s, and Paul, who still coaches young vaulters in Texas.
Bob Richards was born in February 1926. He lives today on his 4,000 acre ranch near Gordon (Texas), another 50 miles further from DFW, raising miniature horses.

A sample of the men coming up to Richards:

•Carl Erickson, former University of Texas and Baylor coach who now helps his son run the Altius pole vault company, sponsor of the meet.
•Les Vanover, a world class high jumper in the Western belly roll days, who now wins awards painting wild life in Granbury.
•Van Weygandt, director of the meet and owner of a construction management business. Van built a pole vault pit in his back yard before his country home was surrounded by Fort Worth sprawl subdivisions. His daughter Shade learned pole vault well enough to become national high school champion and is now a sophomore at Texas Tech. Van still runs a pole vault club with 50 young members.


Bob Richards speaks at Club Altius meet
Richards is a talker. He is also a preacher, so he knows how to captivate a crowd. When Weygandt gave Richards a plaque and handed him the microphone, everyone in the arena stopped to listen.

"This is one of the greatest moments of my life. To walk in here and see all of these young pole vaulters.

"Pole vault is the greatest event there is.

"I won three decathlon titles because I was a pole vaulter.

"They started me pole vaulting because I could walk on my hands. My first meet I jumped 6 feet 9

inches -- and I won!

"That started a dream."

Years later, Richards found himself in Helsinki competing against Russians in the 1952 Olympics. This was when the Cold War was in its deepest freeze, a time when school children were taught to get under their desks in case of an atomic attack and families built backyard bomb shelters stocked with weeks of groceries.

But Richards and the Russians in Helsinki started cheering for each other in the camaraderie that surrounds almost all pole vault events.

"Compete fiercely, but be friends for life," Richards says.

The Helsinki competition came down to a third try.

"I stood on the runway and the bar looked 18 feet high. I was tired. I thought I couldn't possibly make it. So I stepped off the runway and said a prayer.

"I never prayed to win. I just prayed to do my best."

Richards raced down the runway. His pole hit the box and a voice said, "P-U-L-L".

So he pulled as hard as he could.

As he inverted on top of the pole, a voice said, "P-U-S-H."

So he pushed as hard as he could. Pushed himself over the bar to Olympic gold.

"I floated to the ground and raised my arms in victory. The Russians ran up and gave me a big bear hug."

Same as the Texans in Granbury on December 18, 2010.