Billy Cracks The Vault

Having finished an afternoon workout with his former teammates at Abilene Christian University, Billy Olson walks out of the Elmer Gray Stadium with a first-time visitor to Abilene. Pausing, they look around at the parched flat-lands of western Texas. With a 16'5" fiber-glass pole in his hands, Olson probably could vault over everything that grows or grazes between Dallas and Odessa, but without his Swiss-made vaulting glasses on he can't tell if he's staring at a stand of pecan trees or the Swiss Alps. He's almost as helpless as he was three years ago when the lenses of his photosensitive spectacles suddenly turned black while he was competing on the European circuit, and he very briefly became sort of a Ray Charles of vaulting. "Not a whole lot to see, is there?" he finally says. This calls to mind the recent words of his best friend and training partner, Brad Pursley: "Olse, you are blinder than a dang old bat."

There is in fact plenty to see in Abilene this winter, and at indoor track meets from Ottawa to San Diego, too. It's Olson himself, the drawling, amiable 24-year-old who has set six indoor world records in the last 13 months and led a U.S. resurgence in the pole vault. He's already raised the indoor mark from 18'8¼" to 18'10¾"—his latest record coming two weeks ago at the Sunkist meet in Los Angeles—and he could well become history's first indoor 19-footer this season. "I know 19 is in me," he says. "It's just a matter of when and where." For an instant it looked as if that time had come at the Millrose Games last Friday, when Olson tipped the bar off at 19'¼" after winning the vault at 18'6¾".

Olson's height (6'2"), speed (10.5 for 100 meters), excellent technique and upper-body strength make him a nearly ideal vaulter. Aside from his vision, his only problems are a left hamstring that sometimes tightens up, a left arm with limited flexibility and allergies that often force him to carry an inhaler and make him look rheumy-eyed. "I'm allergic to dust, pollen, cats, mold and, most of all, cold," he says.

When competing, Olson is apparently oblivious to pressure. At the Sunkist meet he sipped black coffee and lounged back on the vault pad before his record jump, seemingly preparing himself for a catnap rather than a try at a record height. And he likes nothing better than to exchange jokes with Pursley on the runway right before a big jump. At last year's Jack-in-the-Box meet in San Diego, for example, Olson was about to attempt a then world-record 18'9½" when Pursley came up and whispered, "If you make this, I'll take my shorts off and run around the track." Thus motivated, Olson of course cleared on his second attempt. "But Pursley was gone in a flash. I looked everywhere," Olson grumbles.

To understand how far American pole vaulting had slipped before Olson attained the world's No. 1 ranking last year, check the record book: U.S. vaulters not only broke the 15-, 16-and 17-foot barriers (Cornelius Warmerdam, bamboo pole, 1940; John Uelses, fiber glass, 1962; and John Pennel, fiber glass, 1963, respectively) but won every Olympic gold medal from the start of the modern Games in 1896 through 1968 and held the world's No. 1 ranking every year through 1969. Since then, however, the U.S. hasn't won an Olympic gold in vaulting, and only two Americans besides Olson have ranked first in the world, Steve Smith in 1973 and Dave Roberts in 1976. When the 18-foot mark fell in 1970, the historic vaulter was a Greek, Chris Papanicolaou; at 19 feet it was Thierry Vigneron of France, whose June 1981 jump of 19'¼" was followed six days later by the current world outdoor record of 19'¾" by Vladimir Polyakov of the Soviet Union. That same year, 1981, only one American, Earl Bell, made the world's top 10, placing sixth. As if that weren't humbling enough, the U.S. also lost its top vaulter of 1980, Oregon's Tom Hintnaus, to fashion designer Calvin Klein, who saw Hintnaus jogging on the street one day and promptly signed the vaulter to a contract to model his line of men's bikini briefs.

Last year, however, the U.S. vaulters rebounded, with Olson assuming the world's No. 1 position, Indiana junior Dave Volz (who raised the American outdoor mark twice, to 18'10¼") placing second, and Dan Ripley ranking sixth. "Now it's like the old days," says Ripley, 29, who set five world indoor records himself between 1975 and 1979. Says Volz, "Nineteen isn't the barrier some folks make it out to be. I expect us to reach 19'6"." Even Hintnaus, whose picture adorns a billboard in New York's Times Square, has let vaulting come between him and his Calvins and is in serious training again.

Aside from Olson and Pursley, who are harder to separate than hair and gum, the most promising of the young U.S. vaulters are Volz and Oklahoma State sophomore Joe Dial. Volz, who sat out all of January after minor ankle surgery, holds the American junior record of 18'3¼", and Dial the national high school mark of 18'1¼". And in the finest tradition of vaulting, each seems to swing on slightly loose hinges.

Volz is a curious combination of reticence and daring, unafraid to leap brashly off catwalks 55 feet high in Indiana's field house but laconic even with his good friends. A burly 5'11" and 185 pounds, Volz has tremendous upper-body strength. "He's an animal," says Olson. "He goes down that runway so hard he's almost out of control."

Volz also has such quick reactions that he has popularized "Volzing." If he hits the crossbar on a vault, he will reach out with his left hand, grab the bar and steady it on the standards while still suspended in midair. On his first American record jump last summer, a leap of 18'9¾" at Durham, N.C., Volz bent the crossbar about a foot downward as his body scraped over it, yet kept it from falling with a deft left. So far, there's nothing in the rule book to penalize such "saved" jumps, but that could change. " 'Volzing' ruins the event," says Bell. "If you miss. you should miss."

Volz's versatility—he had high school marks of 6'8" in the high jump, 23'1¾" in the long jump and 14.25 in the 110-meter hurdles—makes him a possible Olympic decathlete in 1988. Around Bloomington, Volz is famous for cliff-diving into the area's water-filled limestone quarries from as high as 100 feet, but he has at least once refused to try cliff-climbing. "The water may tear an arm off," he says, "but solid ground'll tear everything off."