Harvard's Blattler hitting new heights

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http://www.boston.com/sports/colleges/a ... w_heights/

Harvard's Blattler hitting new heights

By Stan Grossfeld
Globe Staff / March 4, 2008
Harvard pole vaulter Clara Blattler has always aimed high. Her grades were perfect all through Brookline High School - a solid 4.0.

But, as we know in New England, perfect isn't forever.

"I'm not perfect here at Harvard," said the senior, who is majoring in earth and planetary science. "But I'm pretty good. Right now it's a 3.8."

But the selection committee for the Rhodes Scholarship at the University of Oxford wanted to know what went wrong.

"Nothing," Blattler told them. "I told them everybody can't be perfect."

They agreed and selected the senior as a Rhodes recipient.

Blattler, 21, who is the Ivy League champion and the school record-holder in the pole vault, plays the violin and worries about global warming.

"I don't think my image is quite the jock image," she said. "A lot of people are surprised, actually, that I do track. They know me outside of athletics. A lot of them would never guess that I'm a jock."

She doesn't drink, doesn't smoke, doesn't take vitamins, doesn't take pills. She never has coffee and has never, ever pulled an all-nighter studying.

"Never have, never will," she said. "They're not really worth it; it's better to sleep for a couple of hours."

She says she never got grief for being a smart jock.

"Teased, but always good-naturedly," Blattler said. "It was never cruel, mean-spirited."

Why the pole vault?

"No. 1, it's lots of fun because of the coordination, guts, courage, and body control," she said. "It's a nice time to take a break in the day from academics at Harvard. It really complements the academic side of Harvard really well."

Blattler said she was surprised when she set the school record at an indoor meet in New York Feb. 24, 2007.

"It was 12 1/2 feet in the Ivy championship," she said. "It was a pretty tight competition. The girl I was competing against had fewer misses, so if it came down to a tie, she would've gotten the win.

"So I went up there and I had never done that [height] before. I was just thinking about the vault and thinking about my technique and what I could do to try to get the bar to stay up.

"It was pretty exciting. It was one of the better jumps of my lifetime."

She says global warming is more important to her than pole vaulting.

"I'd love to contribute to the research on the earth and the climate system," she said. "There's no better time than now to try and understand how our planet works and what we're doing to it. My window on this is looking into the geological past."

She has studied in Namibia, trying to prove that the earth was frozen even at the equator 750 million years ago. She has studied mapping in Argentina, and plans on studying climate conditions during the Pleistocene and Mesozoic periods at Oxford with an eye toward future solutions.

"We'll still be dependent on fossil fuels for a long time," she said. "It's not going to be solved overnight. But investing in alternative sources of energy is going to make a great difference."

Asked why students aren't up in arms about the Iraq War, Blattler shrugged.

"College can be a comfortable little bubble you live in," she said. "There's interesting people around you all the time. Interesting classes. It's very easy to get separated from the real world and not to care about the real world. College is a little bit selfish. Maybe there's a time for that and a time to make a better world."

And the issue of performance-enhancing drugs?

"In track, unfortunately, it's quite prevalent," Blattler said. "It's just awful. Sports is about striving for the best and trying to test the human body and see what it can accomplish.

"Marion Jones, I think she should lose her medals. I think it's unfortunate for her relay team. Did she not trust herself that she could be the fastest in the world if she just trained naturally?"