Something Went Wrong

Pole vaulter Brian Sternberg, 20, always refused to take himself seriously. A sophomore at the University of Washington, Sternberg was genuinely surprised when he was invited to compete at the Penn Relays last April. "They paid $325 for my airplane ticket," he said, "and I don't know how I could be worth that much to anybody." Then he vaulted to a new world record of 16 ft. 5 in. "That record won't last 24 hours," he said, and even when he raised the record to 16 ft. 8 in. last month in Compton, Calif., he still insisted that there must be better vaulters around. "If I can go 16 ft. 8 in. doing everything wrong," he said, "there's bound to be somebody else who can go 17 ft. 6 in. It's all in the fiber-glass pole." Like most top vaulters of the fiberglass pole era, Sternberg was as much a gymnast as a trackman. He worked out regularly on a trampoline to improve his balance and body control, was rated one of the ten best trampoline men in the country. One day last week, he was tuning up for the U.S.-Russian track meet in Moscow late this month by performing a complicated trampoline maneuver called a "flifis": a double backward somersault with a twist. Something went wrong. He seemed to lose control in midair, fell 14 ft. head-first and sprawled motionless on the trampoline. Paralyzed from the neck down, he was rushed to a hospital, where doctors found a dislocated cervical vertebra--in layman's language, a broken neck. At week's end his condition was still listed as "critical," and the probability of permanent paralysis was "very high." Sternberg seemed resigned to the end of his vaulting days. "You change your values fast," he said. "I just hope I can take it."

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