KEY TO THE VAULT

By KEVIN FEDARKO/ATLANTA

At the inaugural track-and-field meet for Atlanta's Olympic stadium in May, two officials watch a Ukrainian pole vaulter prepare for his first jump. The vaulter has been rooted in hypnotic concentration for almost two minutes when, without warning, he explodes down the runway. His legs blur into the scorching stride of a 100-m sprinter, but his upper body is like no sprinter's on earth. It looks more like a bag of rocks lashed together with steel cable. He hauls all this bulk to the end of the runway, then plants 17 ft. of fiber glass into the ground and proceeds to rocket, upside-down, toward the bar hanging nearly 20 ft. above his head. He has barely cleared the bar when one official turns to the other with an unusual confession. "Damn," he exclaims. "Check out Bubka. Wish that guy'd agree to be my wife's sperm donor."

Um, gosh. This is surely a flattering tribute. But it's hardly the sort of notion one expects to hear Men Who Follow Sports expressing to each other, even in the New Age '90s. Come to think of it, this is hardly the sort of notion one expects to hear any man, in any age, expressing even to himself. But when Sergei Bubka thunders down the runway with the zeal of a mounted hussar about to drive his lance through a peasant yeoman, people are apt to do strange things. Things one wouldn't expect them to do. Things one might call downright ... unnatural. Like the three frat brothers who wrench their gaze away from the bikini-clad strumpets draped over the first-deck seats to train their binoculars on the vault pit. Or the women heading for the video monitor, who have just abandoned places in the rest-room line they have been holding for 30 minutes. Or the enterprising youngsters pelting spectators with hot-dog parts, who have suddenly adopted an air of near religious quiescence. Indeed, the entire stadium seems frozen in the sort of electrified, meditative reverence generally reserved for events of celestial magnitude.

Which, let's face it, is a pretty fair description of Sergei Bubka. This, after all, is a man so good at what he does that he often starts vaulting at heights that have already defeated most of his rivals; a man who has jumped higher than any other human being (20 ft. 13/4 in.); a man who has dominated his field more ruthlessly and carved more world records for himself (35--18 indoors, 17 outdoors) than any other sportsman in history. But Bubka is more than simply the world's premier vaulter. He is an athlete who has so transcended his event that his most formidable competitors (some insist his only competitors) are himself and whatever law of physics ordains that a human being has no business leaping the height of a two-story town house.

Bubka, 32, has been tilting at limitations for years, ever since he began vaulting at age 10 in the Ukrainian coal town of Lugansk, against the wishes of his father, a Soviet army sergeant. "It was a very hard time," he recalls. For nine years he persevered, unheralded, until the 1983 World championships in Helsinki. There he cleared 18 ft. 81/4 in. on his first try, a jump that won the gold and presaged dazzling things to come. So green was Bubka at the time that he failed to show up at the required press conference afterward; he had already taken the bus back to the athletes' village.

Since then, he has founded a one-man sports dynasty of the sort that most athletes can only dream of achieving. He claimed his first world record (19 ft. 2 1/4 in.) in 1984, the same year the Soviet boycott forced him to miss the L.A. Olympics (two weeks before, he jumped six inches higher than the eventual gold medalist). He won a gold of his own at Seoul in 1988, and then set his sights on 20 ft.--a seemingly superhuman barrier that like the four-minute mile and the 8-ft. high jump, was regarded for years as insurmountable. He crashed through the ceiling in March 1991 and then, during an eight-day rampage, mocked his own achievement by bettering it twice.

Then came Barcelona. During the 1992 Olympics, Bubka was one of the few sure bets to win a gold. Instead, to everyone's astonishment, he scotched his first three attempts, ignominiously booting himself from the competition. This was more than simply the single biggest track-and- field failure of the entire Olympics; it was also a rent in the cosmic fabric, a mishap as inconceivable as A.J. Foyt's pulling his car out of the garage and backing over the family cat. The fans in Barcelona sat in shocked silence, then proceeded to whistle him out of the stadium--Europe's equivalent of a Bronx cheer. The debacle was so startling that some observers began composing Bubka's professional obituary. Less than two months later, however, he was back in form and set a new record at a meet in Italy. The ascent has continued, with only minor interruptions, ever since.

As he has soared to ever more dizzying heights, Bubka has come to be seen as a man who does not break barriers so much as toy with them. More than a dozen of his world records have been by one inch or less. Cynics take note: each of those minor increments triggers a lucrative bonus of as much as $50,000 from meet promoters and equipment sponsors. The parsimonious control with which Bubka seems to measure out these achievements has raised eyebrows among purists, who suspect he may have turned the pole vault into a kind of personal cash machine by slicing the bonus bacon with such exquisite thinness.

The charge is not without weight. Since the collapse of the U.S.S.R., Bubka has become the most successful pitchman to emerge from the wreckage of the Soviet sports machine, striking a fat endorsement deal with Nike that has made his face as familiar to Europeans as Bo Jackson's and Michael Jordan's are to Americans. Marketing savvy has served Bubka well, establishing him not only as a man of the world record, but also as a man of the world, who maintains for his family a pied-a-terre in Berlin, a condo in Monaco and an apartment in his hometown of Donetsk.

But to insist on seeing Bubka's ambitions solely in terms of material gain is to ignore the depth of his attachment both to his sport and to Ukraine. In addition to his athletics club in Berlin, where he conducts much of his own training, he runs the Bubka sports club in Donetsk, which sponsors 35 coaches and more than 200 children. Each February he also puts together an invitational in Donetsk, in which vaulters from all over the world compete. "I had a dream to do this for our young people," he says. "With changes in my country, many coaches have resigned because they didn't have enough money, and interest in sports is down. But in Donetsk, I can sponsor many events in track and field and focus on results. I feel obligated to make this commitment."

To view his motives as purely pecuniary, one must also dismiss how astonishingly difficult the vault is, even for a master like Bubka. This is not always easy to appreciate, perhaps because there is something deceptively buoyant and elastic about the way a vault appears to unfold on TV. But to see it from 50 ft. away is to understand that the vault is a brutish thing. The poles, especially the ones Bubka uses, are as stiff as lampposts, and their throat-catching bend is the product of extraordinary speed and gristle. Bubka's virtue, or one of them, anyway, is that he makes the transformation from visceral thunk at the jump's base to airy finesse at its apogee look effortless. At the last second, he offers the bar a crisp, flapping salute with his palms and fingertips. "It's an unbelievable feeling," says Bubka. And from the spectator's vantage, it's an unbelievable sight.

The fluency he achieves in midair is present outside the stadium as well. He is funny, charming and, despite a reputation for tempestuous disputes with officials, utterly without arrogance. The day before the Atlanta meet, he is the merry prankster, full of jokes and wisecracks. When his Nike representative's cell phone beeps, Bubka snatches it up and informs the caller that the official is too tied up with girls to talk. While perusing socks at Macy's, he seizes a pool cue from a mannequin and declares, "This is my new pole!" Then he giggles over the fact that he has accidentally wandered into the wrong dressing room.

If Bubka is haunted by Barcelona, he's not about to let on. "A medal?" he asks, smiling. "We will see. I try to remember Barcelona and use it to be more focused for Atlanta. But I just want to make best results possible." That sounds innocuous enough. But the piercing memories of the past, like the injuries that increasingly plague him with age, are clearly visible, etched into his face when he competes. He is still great, but he can no longer overpower the field with the effortlessness of yore. Barcelona changed that. Which, in a way, may not be such a bad thing. Before, Bubka was godlike; now he is all too human, and the battle he faces against himself in July imbues him with a mortality that he seemed to lack before. In the process, it restores dimensions of mystery, suspense and, should he win the gold, redemptive grace to a man who once personified mere majesty.