A couple of years ago, my pal Jim O’Brien was chewing the fat with a New York cabbie, and asked where he was born. ‘Ukraine’ came the reply, to which the only response was, of course, ‘Sergei Bubka’! “Everyone knows Bubka,” growled the cabbie.
But there was a time when nobody knew Bubka. Even after he had sprung a massive surprise, in winning the vault as a 19 year old at the inaugural IAAF World Champs in Athletics, in Helsinki 1983.
I interviewed him at Crystal Palace the following year, when he had very little English. He had set a world record that night, at a venue whose regular swirling winds were anathema to the pole vault. The reason that he had been sent to Crystal Palace, along with several colleagues, who also returned world class performances, was to the remind the world, notably the USA, what they would be missing a month or two later, when the Soviets boycotted the Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
However, back to Bubka. I probably interviewed him, or sat in on his press conferences dozens of times in the succeeding years while he dominated his event. But I never heard the tale he told me a couple of days ago, here at the inaugural Youth Olympic Games in Singapore.
Bubka is in sports politics nowadays. He is president of the Ukraine National Olympic Committee (Valery Borzov is his VP), he is Senior VP of the IAAF, and he’s also on the IOC exec.
Since Bubka was little older than some of the contestants here at the YOG, when he won in Helsinki, we thought it would be a good idea to get him on local TV here in Singapore, to talk about that Helsinki experience.
I began by saying none of us in the media knew who he was in Helsinki, and asked whether he expected to win any sort of medal in 1983.
“Nobody knew who I was, not even my team colleagues. My coach had told me I would arrive at the top when I was 20, but we did it a year early. But I didn’t know anything, I didn’t know about the media, I didn’t know about the protocol. After I won, I just went and got on the bus back to the village. Kozakiewicz (1980 Olympic vault champ, from Poland) saw me, and said, ‘what are you doing here?’ ‘I said, why where should I be?’ ‘At the press conference,’ he said.
“Two hours later, Konstantin Volkov (a Russian, then Soviet) who had won silver came to find me, and he was really pissed (off). First, I had won the gold medal, second, he had spent an hour with journalists asking him questions about me. He said, ‘And I know nothing about you, I don’t know where you come from, I don’t know how old you are, I don’t even know who you are. In fact, who are you?’
Well, we certainly found out over the succeeding years, as Bubka racked up 35 world records, won six world titles in a row, and somehow contrived to win only one Olympic gold, in Seoul 1988.
When I spoke to Yelena Isinbayeva earlier in the week - she too is here, as an Olympic ambassador - she’s said that by the time she retires, around 2014, she wants to put the world record so far out there, “it will last forever”.
That’s not going to happen, of course, and anyway, it was said tongue-in-cheek. But it’s happening with Bubka’s 6.14 metres. That is now 16 years old, and his indoor record, at one centimetre higher, is 17 years old.
Another measure of those marks is that, among current vaulters, Renaud Lavillenie of France is closest, at 6.01 metres. Lavillenie is only 23 years of age, the same age Bubka was, when he cleared 6.01m for the first time. But it was a world record when Bubka did it. And 15 centimetres looks an awful long way up, even for someone of Lavillenie’s obvious talents.
Le Grand Sergei looks as if he is going to be top of that particular heap for a very long time to come.
Speaking of long-standing records, I’ll end on a different Franco/Ukrainian note. There was a beautiful moment on the final night of athletics here at the YOG. The evening had been marred by torrential rain, which particularly affected the hammer throwers.
She only got one valid throw out, but 59.08 metres was enough for Alexia Sedykh to win gold in the young women’s event. You could say that this gold was utterly predictable, because dad, as you’ve guessed is Yuriy Sedykh, who won Olympic hammer gold in 1976 and 1980, and mom is Natalya Lisovskaya, who won shot put gold in Seoul 1988.
They both still hold their respective world records, incidentally, Yuriy with 86.74 metres, at the European Champs in Stuttgart 1986; and mom with 22.63 metres, in Moscow 1987.
The Sedykh family lives in Paris nowadays, and Alexia competes for France. She was awarded her gold medal by Nawal El Moutawakil, who won the Olympic 400 metres hurdles in Los Angeles 1984 (courtesy, one might say, of the East European boycott); but guess who was on hand to give the mascots to the medal winners?
He’s bald at the front nowadays, and the grey hair at the back is tied in a long ponytail, but I doubt anyone is ever going to call him a superannuated hippy, at least not to his face, because he’s still built like a Mack truck. It was, of course, dad. He duly handed over the mascot to Alexia, then reached up and clasped the gold medallist in a long, enormous bear-hug.
It brought tears to the eyes of even the most cynical commentator. And I should know.
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