With the old, stiffer poles, the vaulter took a tremendous shock in hands and shoulders when he planted the pole in the vaulting box at the end of his run. Much of this shock is now taken up by the easier bend of fiberglass, as it was taken up by the flexibility of bamboo in Warmerdam's day. The energy that was lost in the jarring shock of the steel or aluminum pole against the vaulters' arms and shoulders is transformed into bend in the fiberglass pole and returned to the vaulter as the pole straightens out. Uelses, at the moment, is the man who has learned best the complicated technique involved in utilizing this return of energy. He is by no means the first to work on it. The original fiberglass pole was used by Bob Mathias in 1948. In the 1952 Olympics he set a decathlon record with it. Herb Jenks, the man who produced the first pole, says, "We've been making it for 14 years and nobody said a word. We've sold some 75,000 fiberglass poles. ( Bruce Caldwell comment that is a very exaggerated number Maybe a lot of Bamboo poles ? lol) Now all of a sudden, because a couple of guys have done something no one else ever did, they talk about outlawing it."
Imitation bamboo
The Sila-Flex Sky-Pole was a conscious imitation of bamboo. "The structure is similar," Jenks says, "since they both have many lengthwise fibers. We developed the new high-density fiberglass about two years ago, working on materials for nose cones. In the poles 90% of the fibers run lengthwise, with 10% crosswise to hold them together. Then we bind the fibers by impregnating them with plastic resin."
Bragg, incidentally, was given a fiberglass pole by the Sila-Flex people.
" Bragg kept saying fiberglass had advantages but that there wasn't a pole made of it strong enough to hold him," Jenks says. "To shut him up we made one and took it over to his apartment in Van Nuys. He flexed it, looked it all over, and said, 'That's just what I need.' He was going to practice with it and use it. That was before the Compton meet last year. In the meet, he showed up with his metal pole and didn't even place. That was the last we heard from him. I guess he realized there was no magic in it, that you still had to be a good athlete. He probably thought he was too old to start learning a new technique."
Possibly the most expert user of the fiberglass pole until Davies and Uelses was Aubrey Dooley, who taught both of the younger men. Dooley, now a Marine lieutenant, used the pole as an undergraduate at Oklahoma State; he instructed Davies in its use when Davies came to that school, taught Uelses when Uelses came to the Quantico Marine Base.
"My interest in John Uelses was as a teammate at Quantico," Dooley says. "I had worked with the fiberglass pole for over three years, and I felt I could help him with some of the minor points he didn't know—staying on his back as long as possible, delaying his timing to handle the slower reaction of the pole, the knack of keeping his hands apart for better control during the swing and while on top. He made the switch real easy."
Dooley points out another thing that makes Uelses a 16-foot vaulter.
"He has something unique in technique. He leads with his left leg and that lets him stay on his back longer. That keeps his shoulders square, and he can use all of his forward momentum in the swing."
Much has been made of the short run Uelses takes before his vault, and critics of the fiberglass pole maintain that this shows speed is not necessary.
"The reason he takes a shorter run is because that's all he needs to reach his maximum controllable speed," Dooley says. "You check his record, and you'll find he runs the 100 in 9.8, which is comparable to the speed of Bob Gutowski or Bob Richards. If he ran any farther, he'd just be using up energy he needs in the vault itself." Vaulting on the new pole is not difficult, says Dooley. "Anybody can use the fiberglass pole, including Bragg," he says, "if he has what it takes to stay with it and learn."Uelses has added refinements in technique that are peculiarly his. He is the only vaulter in the world who cocks his pole in reverse. All the rest of the vaulters bend the pole toward the pit; Uelses tries to make his pole bend back toward him, away from the pit.
"I found that out by accident," he said. "The pole bent backward once, and I got a good vertical lift from it. Then I experimented. I found that if the pole bends toward the pit it adds to your forward motion and takes away some of your lift. If you can bend it backward—cock it away from the pit—it tends to throw you back toward the runway. You have forward momentum from your run, and this counteracts the pole and you wind up with a good vertical lift."
Possibly the least surprised person in the country when Uelses cleared 16 feet was Dr. Richard V. Ganslen, professor of physiology and kinesiology at the University of Arkansas, and the world's leading authority on pole-vaulting.
"If an athlete thinks the thing can be done and the record is inadequate, mechanically speaking, he will break the record," Ganslen says. "We've simply had a tremendous psychological evolution in all athletic skills."
As to the pole itself: "Actually, the principle of the flexible pole is nothing new. The bamboo pole was just as flexible as fiberglass, and you didn't see anyone trying to take them away from vaulters like Ozolin of Russia in 1928 or Ohe and Nishida of Japan in 1932. Ohe and Nishida placed second and third in the 1932 Olympics using exquisitely thin bamboo poles especially selected for their flexibility and just as flexible as fiberglass. With the fiberglass pole, the vaulter does less work at the start but must do much more at the end. It's still the man on the end of the pole that counts." Bruce Caldwell Comment : I did not correct the grammar in this article as it is a quote and written by Sports Illustrated.
