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Dave Roberts……….2006 pole vault summit ..

Induction into the pole vault Hall of Fame...


I want to thank the committee for selecting me to the National Pole Vault Hall of Fame. It is a great honor to be so recognized at this year’s Summit for something I did so long ago. It’s been thirty years for me. It may seem a heresy to you—so passionate as each of you are about vaulting—but I must confess that (without Google) I could not quote the current world record or name who holds it. I must confess that until last summer I hadn’t watched an Olympics since 1976. I do not know when or where the next Olympics will be. The years have distanced me from the day to day practice of pole vaulting.

And yet pole vaulting brings us together tonight: you with a beautiful passion for vaulting and I who seem to have lost it. I hope that each of you, like me tonight, will have the fortune some day to look back many long years to your time as a vaulter and recall that time with the pleasure I have tonight. Though I cannot share with you the day to day practice of pole vaulting, from this perspective—thirty years out—pole vaulting brings us closer than you may suspect.

From this perspective—thirty years out—I want to give you, for whom pole vaulting occupies every waking and sleeping moment (yes, I do remember that), some news of the future. Across thirty years, you and I still have much in common. For example, there is no other group of people in the country that would understand the irresistible urge I have, walking across a bridge, to jump off. In my profession as an emergency physician, we restrain these people and send them to a psych unit. And yet this fantasy requires no explanation for a pole vaulter to understand. This is the pole vaulter’s spirit and it is unfortunate that we were not given wings. How many of you dream about flying—without the airplane? One bit of news from the future is that when you get to my age, you still dream about pole vaulting. This is good news for you.

I want to leave you with three bits of news that, tonight, bring our pasts and futures together.

Number one is to always accelerate into the take-off. Do the physics: at equal velocities the mass that is accelerating up to the point of takeoff stores more momentum into the pole than the mass at constant velocity. The mass is the pole vaulter’s, well, a**. That is pretty close to the center of gravity, upon which the acceleration acts. This is not just about pole vaulting. You, as pole vaulters, bring this coordination of accelerating body parts to everything you do in the future. It helps me get that particular body part of mine through a long night shift in the emergency room—and it still comes in handy when I walk across a bridge.

Number two is to plant high. We all know how difficult this is. It requires manipulating an awkward object while running at high speed into a small hole in the ground—with perfect relaxation and ease. How many of you actually see the box? The only times I saw the box were just before I landed in it. Planting the pole is a very sophisticated and delicately choreographed dance, done almost blindfolded. It is a sort of oxymoron: it requires doing unrelated things at high speed with disparate body parts—without thinking about it.

In the real world, they call this “multitasking.â€

Do the physics: at equal velocities the mass that is accelerating up to the point of takeoff stores more momentum into the pole than the mass at constant velocity.

Dave Roberts was one of my heros when I was a young vaulter and much of what is said here should be taken to heart, but sorry, not the physics reference. The physics is simply p=mv where p is momentum, m is mass, and v is velocity. The acceleration that gets a mass to a particular velocity has no effect on momentum, by definition.

good morning vtcoach

i think the point david was trying to make was not spicificly to do with the science but to put an exclamation mark on the point that you have to haul a** into the plant if you want to jump your best.

that's why i put it in history and not techniqe..

but i thought it was a pretty awesome piece of work that would be nice to share.

i think this was read at the summit because david couldn't attend.

dj

Strange to stumble onto this. Thanks for everyone's kind words. I may have written this obscurely. I have to dig deep to pull this up, and I may be completely off, but I think the physics is close: F=ma. The force the vaulter encounters from the pole at takeoff is a complex product of mass and acceleration acting on two moment arms that vary as the vault progresses. The vaulter's acceleration becomes a negative value as the pole absorbs the horizontal energy of the vaulter at takeoff (where P=mv). Then the angular momentum of the swing and the rotation of the pole begin to operate on the vaulter's center of mass in complex ways. The height of the vault would be determined from the potential energy of mgh, which is the sum of the horizontal and rotational energies of the run and swing stored into the pole. This is simplistic and it requires calculus to really get it straight; I'm sure an engineer could lay it out clearly. Anyway, I'm in over my head with the physics. The end result is hopefully to land in the pit and not the box. If one goes over the bar in the process, so much the better.

Dave R