Keisa Monterola (Venezuela), going higher and higher

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http://www.iaaf.org/magazine/news/Kind= ... 35545.html

Keisa Monterola, going higher and higher
Thursday 3 August 2006
Winner of Venezuela’s first ever World Championships medal, 18-year-old Keisa Monterola is now looking to build up on her 2005 successes to improve to gold at the Beijing World Junior Championships. Eumar Esaa reports

In 2001, a cry from Yoisemil Fuentes saved the lives of her colleagues in the Venezuelan athletics team when she realised that the driver of the coach they were travelling on to Ambato to take part in the Bolivarian Games had fallen asleep at the wheel.

What Yoisemil could not save over the ensuing years were her national Pole Vault records from the voracious grasp of young Keisa Monterola, a former gymnast who, in 2005, secured Venezuela its first medal at a World Athletics Championships.

Keisa grew up in a sports-obsessed family, thanks to the passion of her father, Israel, who had been a gymnast during his university days. Leyda, her mother, soon discovered that the only way to control little Keisa’s boundless energy was swimming.

Shortly after, when she turned five, Keisa took up gymnastics and her speciality apparatus was the vault where her aerial prowess came to the fore. She was on the verge of making the national team, but at 12 years old she had grown too big for gymnastics and injuries were beginning to take their toll.

This was when Alexander Radchich appeared on the scene. Born in Turkmenistan, he had been hired in 1998 to coach in Venezuela and had already coached Ricardo Diez to the Venezuelan Pole Vault record of 5.35m, which stands to this day. Radchich suggested that the young Keisa should change to the Pole Vault, a discipline she was not familiar with, and thus began the partnership that has given Venezuelan athletics its best results over the last five years.

In 2000, at the tender age of 12, Monterola cleared 2.70m in her first ever competition. “Jumping made me scared and excited at the same time, but the latter emotion won through as I was even beating the male vaulters way back then,â€Â