Yelena Isinbayeva raises bar to new heights
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
(Bernd Thissen/EPA)
Yelena Isinbayeva celebrates after clearing the bar to set a new world record
Image :1 of 2
Simon Barnes's Olympic blog
I have romantic feelings about things. You know: dolphins, country pubs, three-day eventing, Emma Kirkby's voice, Japanese gardens, rainforests. Do you, dear reader, have romantic feelings about odds and ends of stuff? Feelings that are by and large useless, perhaps even unhelpful in any practical terms, but are all the same an inescapable part of you?
But of course you do. You are reading the sports pages. No one with a totally practical grasp of reality, with a properly cynical view of life, bothers with the sports pages. Such people can't see the point. So yes, we certainly share a romantic view of sport: the idea that sport is worth even a few moments of your time is in itself a romantic point of view.
I also have romantic feelings about women. I mean about aspirational women, about strong women, about conquering women. It's something to do with the Seventies, when feminism was a novel idea, something that most of the women in my life were committed to. Me too. The idea of women taking wing, soaring, coming into their own, finds a very strong response in me.
Such things were not only going to be good news for women, but for all the world, especially for men. That's what it was all about. And so women did a fair bit of soaring and men did a fair bit of changing, and here we are, changing nappies, sharing jobs, all that sort of thing.
Much has been achieved, much has still to be done, but society has changed since the days when someone announced at Woodstock: “Some cat's old lady's just had a baby.” Which brings me to the women's pole vault, as fine an emblem of soaring womanhood as you could wish for. Sport brings these images that we respond to, for all kinds of personal and unexpected reasons, and the women's pole vault is an image of everything that I thought feminism should be. I remember being staggered by the sight of it in Sydney in 2000, the first time it was held as an Olympic competition: one amazing woman after another, and each of them effortlessly clearing the height of a Tudor cottage.
The physique of these women is a thing to behold: tall, beautifully muscled, sleek, panther-like. And the flight so high that they have time to celebrate a clearance on the way down. On, then, to the glorious Yelena Isinbayeva. She has the event as a personal fiefdom - a Russian diva in mascara and nail varnish and earrings in the shape of dolphins. She has, you will be pleased to learn, romantic feelings about dolphins.
She is unbeatable. Simple as that. By the time she took her first vault, nearly half the field was already out. “Pole vaulting is like limitless happiness,” she said. She clearly has romantic feelings about her event. Her technique is perfection. In a young event, she is the only woman pole vaulter that men can learn from, according to some observers. Those who know about these things point to that phase in the jump when pole and jumper form opposed letter Ls, the moment when forward speed is converted into height. She was a gymnast until she was 15 and grew too tall. That flexibility, and above all that bodily control, is her edge.
So she let all the lesser jumpers do their stuff. She brought a mattress with her. No joke: she knew that she would be spending a lot of time lying down, so she brought a little bed. She also brought a sarong to wear while waiting to jump. Nice touch, I think you'll agree.
But the truth is in the action. She took her second jump at 4.85 metres, and it was enough. No one could live with that. She smiled, blew a kiss, her face shedding all its intensity and mystery. She has set 24 world records so far, and is eyeing up Sergei Bubka's 35 in the men's event. Her father was a plumber, she is a queen of the new Russia.
And so, as a personal lap of honour, she upped the bar to 4.95. To her dismay, she failed twice, but she cleared it on her third attempt to set an Olympic record. Blown kisses for all of us lucky enough to be there, but she was not done. She is the only woman to have cleared five metres, and she has broken the world record twice in the past month. Now she had the bar raised to 5.05 metres to try for one more.
She failed twice. But on her last jump, cranking it up to the absolute maximum, because she is sport's undisputed No1 drama queen, she got it right. And she flew, her technique the most beautiful thing you will see at these Games, and a record was hers. She won by 25 centimetres. Lord, did she pout.
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