High on a Swizzle Stick

By Tom Callahan

Pole Vaulter Billy Olson passes 19ft. and keeps looking up

Billy Olson used to dream of flying, not over crossbars, over rooftops. "I imagined myself jumping off fences and just flying," he says, "running down the street, flapping my arms and . . . taking off." For those who have never traveled by catapult, this is the sensation of pole vaulting.

So, as it happens, is Olson, a droll and drawling Abilene Texan, who at the snap of a fiberglass tube this month hoisted himself 19 ft. 1/4 in., becoming the first man to vault 19 ft. indoors. "I'm going to go higher," he promises, "I think a good bit higher, though I'm not saying how high. I don't want to do it some day and get happy with it. I want to go higher and higher." Just how high a man can go, like how fast and how far, has always been the peculiar fascination of athletics in its purest form, track and field, where the athletes are not exactly pure but certainly are peculiar.

As an amateur tradition, under-the-table paychecks date back to the Punic Wars at least. Still, considering the regimen of exercise and travel in light of the pay scale in popular professional games, the people who test man's physical limitations qualify as idealists, even dreamers. And it is not too hard to believe Olson when he lists the rewards as "very little money, a certain amount of glory, mostly the sensation of the jumping itself, the feeling of it, the rush it gives you that's like nothing else. Then, the competition. If nothing came out of it but the competition, that would be enough for me."

It is not even too hard to believe Cornelius Warmerdam, who at 67 has stopped vaulting and does not mind saying how high men can go: 24 ft. No matter how powerful the man, or how pliable his swizzle stick, Warmerdam says 24 ft. That's just his opinion, but he knows something about these things.

Warmerdam vaulted 15 ft. in 1940 when everyone, including Warmerdam, thought it was impossible. "It was like the sound barrier," he says. Before anyone else made 15 ft., eleven years later, Warmerdam had done it 43 times. He held the world record 15 years. "Of course I go back to when the pole was a pretty stable instrument," he explains. Warmerdam's first bolt of bamboo carried him over high hedges and cringing livestock all across his father's spinach farm in California's San Joaquin Valley. His records were built of bamboo; steel and aluminum poles came along in the '50s, fiberglass in the '60s. Since then, the record has been improved by leaps and sproings. But the 19-ft. 3/4in. outdoor mark of that aptly named Russian Vladimir Polyakov has been posted over a year and a half now, and only Frenchman Thierry Vigneron (19 ft. 1/4 in.) and Olson have reached such heights.

"The equipment is better," says Warmerdam, "but so are the athletes. It's a combination." Just as the pole vaulter himself is a combination: sprinter, weight lifter, gymnast. He is characteristically happy. "Because," says Warmerdam brightly, "it is just a fun thing to do."

Olson "honestly and truthfully" discovered pole vaulting in an encyclopedia, a picture sequence of Warmerdam floating above the bar. "I thought, 'Golly, that's the neatest-looking thing.' " Later, as a teenager, he commandeered a friend's pole and commenced 12-ft. and 13-ft. launches. "It takes a certain reckless nature," he acknowledges, "to run full speed with a 16 1/2-ft. pole, stick that thing in a box and twang yourself into the air."

A bail bondsman's son, Olson says, "I was the proudest boy in town the day I got a college scholarship." Now 24, finished at Abilene Christian University, he has been testing and shaping himself with a bespectacled eye on the 1984 Olympics, meanwhile amending the indoor record seven times. Next week the peripatetic indoor season climaxes at New York's Madison Square Garden with the U.S.A. Mobil Indoor Track and Field Championships.

Travel has never been easy for pole vaulters. Cab drivers would take Warmerdam, but not Warmerdam's poles. Says Olson: "The poles won't fit on the airplanes that fly out of Abilene, so you have to strap them on the car--four or five of them in 6-in. cylinders--and drive them to Dallas. Most people think they are cannons. You should see me coming though the airport. People do a lot of ducking."

He is further burdened by golf clubs. Olson, who declares modestly, "I can hit a golf ball farther than any man in the world," is accustomed to driving 360-yd. par 4s. Though a score in the high 70s or low 80s usually pleases him, it seldom thrills his playing partners. "I've been accused of being a sandbagger," he admits. "I guess I'm the most frustrated golfer in the world. I'll tell you, if I had the choice of being the best pole vaulter in the world or the best golfer, I'd trade."

But he seems to reconsider even as he says it. Golfers can't fly.

--By Tom Callahan This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.