lonestar wrote: You don't see any 4.90 vaulters at the Olympic for a reason - there is a standard.
The day a vaulter goes to Nationals with a 4.90 PR is the day i hang up my spikes.
lonestar wrote: As for everyone who keeps saying that Texas always has great winds, that's bs. I've lived here for 5 years, having come from the north, been to 100's of meets and practices at dozens of facilities, and can tell you for a fact that the winds are not perfect. Some facilities like the University of Texas generally luck out with good winds, but I've seen a lot of tracks with end-zone pits going east-west with bad crosswinds, tracks set down into man-made bowls with winds that swirl all over the place, and several meets that a front blew in on and changed the wind direction 180 degrees in a heartbeat. And yes, it does rain here and get cold.
The point is weather and jumping conditions, in general, are a HUGE advantage for those vaulters that have the majority of their meets in southern areas of the country.