For all you vaulter want-to-be's (and coaches), I will share with you the secrets of Tim McMichael's vault (he will get a kick out of this).
He was staying at my house (he was in his late 20's at the time) and my wife and I both saw him comming out of the shower with just a towel around his waist. We both noticed the same thing: From the front, he looked like your average high school vaulter. From the back, he looked like a world class body builder. To this day, I have never seen the development of the muscles he had between his shoulder blades on another human being.
To see his plant (or "takeoff" to you young guys) in person was a mind blower. It was also an optical illusion. Even on the video, it looks like he maintains a significant amount of pressure upward on the pole with his left arm. The truth is he felt the pressure of his left arm on the pole for only a fraction of a second. Almost all of the pressure he felt from the pole was in his right arm pit, which then transitioned to a feeling of all the force being in his back between his shoulder blades.
The story is: At Oklahoma he used to go into the weight room, and the football players thought he must have gotten lost, until he did "rows" with the entire stack of weights on the machine. Because he knew he had the muscle structure to handle it, he has run hard through the box on every vault I have ever seen him take. Don't let him tell you he wasn't fast, because he was as quick and as aggressive at the box as anybody.
By trying to copy the vaults of Jeff Buckingham and Joe Dial, he tailored his vault to his skill set and his body (he couldn't copy them exactly because Buckingham took off significantly underneath for leverage and almost never penetrated past the box, and Dial was so much faster any vaulter).
Tim wasn't a daredevil or a lunatic, he planted big poles because he knew exactly what he wanted to do and he developed the body to do it. As a freshman in high school, he held the top of a 14'140 lb pole (it was the smallest pole the school had). I doubt he was any more than 5'6" and 120 pounds at the time.
There is only one other "secret" to his vault that you need to know. Everyone who knows him knows that he is a devout Christian and he understands that God has blessed him with the ability and opportunity to do what he does for a greater purpose than just clearing a bar or winning the NCAA championship (which he did). He has never taken drugs of any kind and he has beaten plenty of guys who did. When you see his vault on video, you are not watching just a vault, you are watching a calling. He never jumped just for what he got out of it.
If you want to jump like you see in the video (or coach someone who will), now you know how he did it.
