Erica Bartolina focused on success

[rainbowgirl28]

http://www.registerguard.com/csp/cms/si ... id=7&fid=1

Focus on success

By George Schroeder HHHHH

Register-Guard columnist

Published: July 29, 2008 12:00AM



PHILOMATH — She had taken a load of lambs to auction, but they were almost home, Betsy Boren and her girls. When they came over the hill near the driveway, all the sheep were out, wandering along the roadside, and so she braked hard.

In the next instant, a screeching sound, and a big jolt. A pickup truck hit their trailer, breaking its tongue, knocking it into their Datsun pickup.

At first glance everything seemed OK. Margo, not quite 3 years old, was fine. Her head was in Betsy’s lap. And baby Erica, 4 months old, seemed unharmed in the car seat on the passenger’s side of the cab.

Except those hoof-trimmers on Erica’s chest had been on the dashboard before the wreck. And what was that tiny trickle of blood coming from the baby’s right eye?

What had she done? Betsy Boren wondered that for a long time after learning her daughter’s eye had been irrevocably damaged, blaming herself for so many things.

“I held that responsibility for a while,” Betsy says.

What had she done? A better question, all these years later, might be what has Erica done? And the answer starts with the questions people ask when they learn she has one eye. Can you drive? Do you run into things? Do you walk into walls?

Yes. Not really. No, she answers. But she runs and vaults over bars. What Erica Bartolina does is pole vault. She’s an Olympian.

The kid from Philomath — really, nearby Kings Valley — surprised everyone, including herself, when she finished third in the women’s pole vault last month at the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials. At 28, Erica is headed to Beijing, and everyone is still trying to wrap their minds around the concept.

“This is actually happening!” says her father, Pat Boren, shaking his head.

On Wednesday, Erica leaves for China. Michael Bartolina, her husband and coach, will join her there.

Pat and Betsy Boren will stay home because of the difficulty of navigating the bureaucracy of passports and visas and Olympic tickets, and also because they probably wouldn’t have seen much of Erica over there.

Instead, they’re planning a later trip to Europe to watch their daughter compete.

And back home, they’re selling autographed copies of Erica’s calendar — the proceeds go toward paying Michael’s travel expenses — and telling anyone who wants to know how Erica “has taken adversity,” according to Betsy, “and turned it into an adventure.”

Erica never considered herself different. Everyone in Philomath knew about the eye, so it wasn’t a big deal. Not long after Erica got her prosthetic lens, at age 9, Betsy started to say something to her daughter: “I’m sure you’d rather have two normal eyes like everybody else. ...”

Erica leaned back in her mom’s lap: “I don’t know about that,” she said.

“At that point,” Betsy remembers, “I was really able to let go.”

“It’s very normal for me,” Erica says.

Comfortable? Heck, Erica used to pop the eye out, just for laughs. Once in a Corvallis restaurant, she plopped it into a glass, then asked the server: “Do you usually serve your water this way?”

And of the three Boren girls — Irene arrived five years later — Erica was the daredevil. She walked atop fences and built ramps for her tricycle and went at life full-bore.

“You couldn’t keep this girl down,” Betsy says. “She was just squirrely.”

Erica also tried baseball and softball and volleyball, but when you can’t throw accurately or catch well, it’s tough to get enthused. Erica ran cross country, but didn’t like it much, either.

And then her coach, Joe Fulton, suggested she might try the pole vault. It was in its second year as an offering for Oregon high school girls, and Philomath High was always looking for ways to score points and win meets, and Erica had a strong upper body from wrestling horses and sheep and bucking hay, and. ...

Dennis Phillips wasn’t so sure. A former Oregon State standout and world-class vaulter, he’d been working with the Philomath kids in the event, and he liked what he saw.

Erica could do 12 pull-ups as a freshman, she had decent speed, she was wiry and athletic.

“I found out she had one eye,” he said. “Gee, that makes it hard to calculate where the (pit) is.”

But Erica tried it, and enjoyed it.

“It helps to be a little bit crazy,” says Pat, once upon a time a wrestler. “They’re running full speed and sticking that pole in a hole.”

Where a typical vaulter can use depth perception to make tweaks and adjustments during the sprint down the runway — and might not even realize it, because it’s almost automatic — Erica relies on precisely measured steps (until this year, 14; now, she’s backed up and increased the count to 18). If something’s not standard, it’s harder for Erica to adjust on the fly.

But Erica was something of a natural. It wasn’t long before, as her father puts it, Erica was “infected with pole vaulting.” She finished third in the state as a freshman and won a state title as a junior.

After graduation, she headed off to Texas A&M, choosing the school for its combination of opportunities to study business and agriculture and also to pole vault. While there, she won two Big 12 championships and met Michael Bartolina, who became her coach and husband.

They recently relocated to Hammond, La., a small town east of Baton Rouge, where Michael is an assistant coach at Southeastern Louisiana State.

And if you ask Erica about overcoming adversity, she’s likely to tell you about how during a training vault in 2005, the pole’s tip caught the runway too early, flipped her eight feet into the air. She landed on her back, dislocating a hip and fracturing two vertebrae.

“I thought it was just bad bruising,” Erica says. “I was trying to make the fastest recovery possible, and looking back, it was the worst thing I could have done.”

Instead, the initial injury was followed by a string of others, and most of the next two seasons were lost. But by last spring, Erica was finally fit and healthy again, confident and jumping higher in practice than ever before.

So here were Pat and Betsy earlier this month, sitting in the East Grandstand at Hayward Field. Pat held a program, and he kept noting heights cleared and vaulters eliminated from the competition. At some point, he realized Erica would finish in the top half — she’d been ranked 13th of 26 going into the Trials — so it was already a pretty nice day.

The bar kept going higher, and other vaulters kept missing. Finally, on her third and final attempt at 14 feet, 11 inches — almost six inches higher than her previous best before the meet — Erica cleared the bar.

Pat began shouting, and a few others did, too. And for just a moment, Betsy wondered: What has she done?

Then she knew.

[rainbowgirl28]

http://www.lionsports.net/index.php?pid ... le&id=4042

BARTOLINA EMBARKS ON OLYMPIC JOURNEY

HAMMOND - Just over three weeks after clinching a spot on the 2008 U.S. Track and Field Olympic squad, Southeastern Louisiana University track and field volunteer assistant track coach Erica Bartolina will head off to Beijing, China for her first career Olympic games. The 28-year old pole vaulter earned her trip to the 29th Summer Olympiad with a personal best 14 ft. 11 in. vault at the U.S. Olympic Trials in Eugene, Ore. on July 6, and according to her husband and coach Michael, also an assistant track coach with the Lions, Erica is ready to go.

\"Erica doesn\'t have to do anything special, she just has to do what she normally does,\" Michael said. \"She\'s very talented and capable and she has been jumping well in practice and at meets all year long. So what she has to do is focus on what she normally well and not try to do too much. That was what made her so successful at the trials and that\'s what we\'re focusing on heading over there.\"

The Bartolinas will leave Wednesday morning for processing with the rest of the U.S. Olympic team in San Jose, Calif. before heading off to the squad\'s Olympic training base in Dalian, China. The Bartolinas will then make the 45 minute commuter flight across the Bohai Gulf to arrive in Beijing in time for the Opening Ceremonies on Aug. 8.

The women\'s pole vault preliminaries will get underway on Aug. 16th in Beijing, which means Erica will be taking her first Olympic jumps when it\'s approximately 9 p.m. on Friday Aug. 15th in Hammond.

According to Michael, the next 17 days will help Erica adjust to the 13-hour time difference as well as the travel and scheduling demands unique to the summer games that might wear down a first-time Olympian. However, Michael cites Erica\'s experience in prior international competitions as a foundation to build from.

\"Obviously, she doesn\'t have Olympic experience, but she has competed overseas plenty of times and she\'s a very experienced international competitor,\" Michael said. \"That makes all the adjustments easier. But I had the chance to talk to a former Olympic track coach who said the key is to not get caught up in the \'Olympic\' aspect of the Olympic Games and just worry about the games. That ties back into what she needs to do to be successful and that\'s just do what she normally does.\"

Since qualifying for the 2008 Summer Games, the Bartolinas have received an outpouring of support from the Hammond community and have seen Erica\'s fan base grow around town as well as the Southeastern campus.

\"The support has been overwhelming from both the city of Hammond and Southeastern,\" Michael said. \"It\'s been great for her to walk around town and have people recognize and congratulate her for what she\'s done. It\'s really given her a boost.\"

After the preliminaries on the 16th, the women\'s pole vault will conclude with the finals on Monday Aug. 18 at approximately 7 p.m. in Beijing (approximately 6 a.m. on the 18th CDT).

NBC has yet to finalize their full Olympic live broadcast and tape delay schedules, but fans will be able to follow along online at www.nbcolympics.com as television schedules and streaming webcast schedules are finalized.

Fans can also check www.lionsports.net and www.ericabartolina.com as well as their local television listings for continued updates.

[belmore]

I am so rooting for my favorite aggie. Go Erica, way to go Mike.