Steve Hooker's Beijing Bound Diary

[rainbowgirl28]

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/be ... 97,00.html

Steve Hooker's Beijing Bound diary entry, July 15
STEVE HOOKER | July 15, 2008 01:25pm

Steve Hooker's size 12 shoe next to the super-sized beer glass he received for winning a German pole vaulting competition.
AS a pole vaulter in Europe you get to experience all sorts of different competitions.
Sure, you get to compete in big stadiums in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans for big prizemoney and I’ll get the chance to do this on Friday when I compete in the Paris leg of the Golden League series.
As a pole vaulter though, you get the opportunity to compete in competitions that few other athletes would experience and these are known as the ‘town square’ competitions.
They are held in town squares, shopping centres, airports, breweries or, as the case was in Jockgrim, Germany, the other day, down the side of a soccer field. They are usually held in smaller towns as a part of the annual town festival and they are a lot of fun.
The event in Jockgrim, a town in the south of Germany, has been run by the local soccer competition for the past 14 years.
Related Links
Video: Watch my winning vault
Magnificent Seven: More Beijing Bound athletes
To give you an idea of the atmosphere of the competition I will give you a quote from the meet director, a guy by the name of Gunther: “When we started running the competition we didn’t know a lot about pole vault, but we knew how to drink beer.”
The competition is like a big party and it’s actually sponsored by a beer company.
About 3000 people stand just metres either side of the run-up and when they scream the noise is deafening. As the night goes on and the bar gets higher the crowd gets drunker and louder.
Each athlete gets to choose a song to jump to. I jumped to Kids by MGMT. As it gets dark, the lights get turned on and it creates an atmosphere more like that of a movie set than that of an elite sporting event. You start your run-up in near darkness and run into a floodlit take-off area.
Trust me, it’s quite an experience.
I won the competition with a jump of 5.80m (see video) ahead of two Germans, Alex Straub (5.75m) and Tim Lobinger (5.63m). After the meet I was presented with a trophy and a massive 2 litre glass of beer. That’s it, pictured next to my size 12 shoe.
I love doing these meets, they are a lot of fun and a great break from the bigger meets on the World Athletics Tour. It’s great to see different parts of Europe and the way they celebrate whilst also promoting pole vault and athletics.

[jcoover]

Wow... on the vid it looked like he missed his takeoff, hesitated on the swing, fell off of the top and still put up a 5.90m+ jump. This olympics is going to be oh so fun to watch. All of these results and videos of Hooker, Walker, Lukyanenko and others just make me wish more that I could be there to watch in Beijing!

[VaultPurple]

is the orange matt the only matt or is there some stuff around it... cuz that looks kinda small

[rainbowgirl28]

is the orange matt the only matt or is there some stuff around it... cuz that looks kinda small

We use ridiculously huge pits in this country thanks to our litigious culture. I don't think too many European street vaults are nearly as concerned about the size of the pit and supplemental padding. The vaulters over there are pretty good at landing on the pits.

[achtungpv]

We use ridiculously huge pits in this country thanks to our litigious culture. I don't think too many European street vaults are nearly as concerned about the size of the pit and supplemental padding. The vaulters over there are pretty good at landing on the pits.

I wish I still had the pic of Tarasov jumping 5.90 on a pit that was smaller than the tiniest mid-80s pit...there was a foot gap on each side between the pit and the inside rail of the standards. Nowadays you won't let a junior high kid jump on a pit that small.

[golfdane]

There are blue elements on both sides, and on the back.

But yeah, safety is less strict than in the US. We advocate safety in technique before anything else. Sure, I've seen boxes and mats here in Denmark, where I've told my athletes not to jump, if something wasn't done to correct this.

A club here in Denmark replaced their indoor pit, and got a wrong delivery from Polanik (probably the T-547 (5m by 4m by .7m)). There was app. 75 cm's of space between mat and old fixed standards when the new mat was installed. It is the smallest pit I have ever seen. It must be scary small from 5m....

[rainbowgirl28]

New blog update: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/be ... 97,00.html