Why 15' was never the World Record
Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2005 7:01 pm
Working on some men's stats for Gérard Dumas, I ran across an interesting tid-bit in the 2003 edition of Richard Hyman's world records progressions. It has to do with why 15' was never a World Record.
I had known that Dutch Warmerdam's first measured 15' vault (at Berkeley on 13 April 1940) was not ratified as a world record, only because he had improved that to 4.60m on 6 June, before the IAAF could get around to acting on the 15'/4.57m mark and didn't bother with the earlier one. Altogether, Dutch improved on the world best six times and lost three of these as official world records for that reason.
I did not know, though, the reason that the 29 May 1937 world record of Bill Sefton and Earle Meadows was only 14'11". Since they already held the record at 14'8 1/2" (almost certainly a remeasurement of a bar originally placed at 14'9"), I had assumed that the 14'11" was the remeasurement of a bar set for 15'. Since Sefton cleared the height on his second jump and Meadows on his third, it's easy to see that the bar could have been bent that much. Not so, according to Hymans. The bar was set and measured at 14'11" because that was the greatest height to which the standards (at this Pacific Coast Conference Championship in the LA Coliseum) could be raised! Whether either or both could have cleared 15' had they been given the opportunity to try, we'll never know.
I had known that Dutch Warmerdam's first measured 15' vault (at Berkeley on 13 April 1940) was not ratified as a world record, only because he had improved that to 4.60m on 6 June, before the IAAF could get around to acting on the 15'/4.57m mark and didn't bother with the earlier one. Altogether, Dutch improved on the world best six times and lost three of these as official world records for that reason.
I did not know, though, the reason that the 29 May 1937 world record of Bill Sefton and Earle Meadows was only 14'11". Since they already held the record at 14'8 1/2" (almost certainly a remeasurement of a bar originally placed at 14'9"), I had assumed that the 14'11" was the remeasurement of a bar set for 15'. Since Sefton cleared the height on his second jump and Meadows on his third, it's easy to see that the bar could have been bent that much. Not so, according to Hymans. The bar was set and measured at 14'11" because that was the greatest height to which the standards (at this Pacific Coast Conference Championship in the LA Coliseum) could be raised! Whether either or both could have cleared 15' had they been given the opportunity to try, we'll never know.