altius wrote:I love it Pogo stick! Now tell me - are you employing that intelligence helping vaulters improve - if not you should be!
Thanks Altius. It is hard to write free-form text on your second language (or maybe third)... I can just imagine how horrible my sentences are sometime for native speakers. But this will not stop me.
Regarding pole vaulting I am completing full circle: vaulting, doing nothing and now going back toward vaulting.
To paraphrase old saying I would say "Those who can't do, learn" - I am in learning phase now. That means lot of mistakes, wrong conclusions from dodgy data, wrong conclusions from good data and all kind of fallacies in logical reasoning. But I am optimist and I have long term goal.
However to continue with the Petrov thoughts, I suspect that his ideas on the free take off did not come from any calculations but simply from watching Slusarski during the 70s, thinking about what he saw, considering the implications of what the stiff polers - like Warmerdam - did, and deciding that there was no point in wasting energy bending the pole at take off. Not sure if the biomechanists played any part in those deliberations.
I am pretty sure that in Petrov's case the science came later in process as support of basic premises. "There is nothing more practical than a good theory" (by Lewin or Maxwell or Boltzmann)
Anyway Alex Parnov should be in Adelaide in a few weeks time so i will ask him what he thinks about all this. I suspect he will tell me to forget all this nonsense and just get the vaulters out there training hard. That said i believe that he has as good a handle on how to exploit the inversion - from a practical perspective - as anyone on the planet. If you have any influence get him to speak on this at Reno next year!
I would like to help, but I don't know Parnov. We are from different countries - I am from Croatia (Adriatic Sea, city of Split, tags: Blanka Vlasic, Goran Ivanisevic, Toni Kukoc, sorry no remarkable pole vaulters)
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