In All Events, He's The Best

A 14'9�" vault finally had given him the lead after eight events, and Bruce Jenner slipped from the foam-rubber cushion of the pit, showing transparent relief. He stood beside the runway, conferring with a coach and a vault official, Harlan Towne. Suddenly a javelin, curving wildly, descended among the three men, striking Towne a glancing blow on the shoulder and scraping skin from his wrist. It missed Jenner's neck by inches.

A few moments later a pale spectator made his way to Jenner. "Are you all right?" he asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine now," said the decathlete. "My early vaults were shaky, but I switched poles. I found a good one in a tool shed over there."

"I meant after that javelin."

"Oh, that. Didn't ever happen. Not today." Then he took up his pole and cleared 15'5" on his first attempt, a height worth 981 points, as he made his way to a world decathlon record of 8,524 points.

Jenner's calmness in the face of the dive-bombing javelin was typical of his performance in last week's team decathlon meet among the U.S., U.S.S.R. and Poland. En route, he also withstood technical difficulties and the intimidating presence of the defending Olympic champion and former world-record holder, Nikolay Avilov of Russia, as he led the American team, which scored 48,899 points, to a startling victory in Eugene, Ore. The U.S.S.R. was second, with 46,328 points, and Poland had 46,091.

The only satisfaction for the Russians was that their women outclassed pentathletes from Canada and the U.S. In the pentathlon, held on the same track on the same days as the decathlon, the winners scored 13,599 points to Canada's 12,406. The U.S., competing without its record holder, Jane Frederick, who had been injured in a freak Frisbee accident the day before the meet began, ended up with 12,015.

The Soviet athletes—seven men and three women—arrived in Eugene 10 days before the meet, scuffed their feet on the track and went shopping. In a sporting-goods store they were invited to have their names embossed on the backs of T shirts that had RUNNERS MAKE BETTER LOVERS written across the front, and the raunchiness of the Russian translation caused a run on the stock. Then, coming in shaken from a viewing of Jaws, the Russians found they were sharing their dorm complex with 250 girls attending a high school cheerleaders' clinic. On the morning of his 27th birthday, Avilov awoke to find the perplexing sight of a courtyard filled with 20 dancing pompon teams. The strikingly handsome Avilov was soon having his picture taken in discreet embrace with several dozen sighing maids.

"I have stopped serious training for this year," he said, his mobile features producing an expression of mock weariness. "This is just for d�tente."

Combining the top six scores from each nation, team decathlon injects one more statistic into what is perhaps the most complicated—and grueling—test in sport. Decathletes face myriad decisions in training. "If I lift weights too much today, I can't run good intervals tomorrow," says Craig Brigham, runner-up in this year's AAU championships. "If I beef up for the shot, my vaulting and hurdling may suffer." The finest decathletes gravitate toward the golden mean. "You have to look at it as a whole," says Jenner, a 25-year-old insurance salesman from San Jose, Calif. "You'll never see a decathlon man approach a world record in an individual event. It would mean subtracting too many points elsewhere." His size (6'2", 195 pounds) and concentration on the "whole" put Jenner firmly in the tradition of the best-known post-World War II decathlon world-record holders: Bob Mathias, whose highest score was 7,731, Rafer Johnson (8,063), C. K. Yang (8,089), Bill Toomey (8,417) and Avilov (8,454). In 1974, Jenner's 8,308 points in a meet at Tallinn on the Estonian coast was the world's best. At Eugene, he set out from the first event to exceed that achievement with a record of his own.