Swing Efficiency Comparison: Bubka, Tradenkov, Lavillenie

[altius]

"Oh thats right, I'm just seeing thing again, as I'm delusional!"

Well I suppose that recognising the problem is a start towards recovery! But you probably need to talk to some professionals in the mental health field to speed the process up.

[PVDaddy]

Altius, Not a lot to take from that.

[PVDaddy]

Altius, a great example of his grandmothers saying. "A man convinced against his will remains of the same opinion still!"

[willrieffer]

I quick aside:

DJ has posted (numerous times I believe) that many vaulters (Bubka included) were on poles whose extreme stiffness did not allow for adequate deflection and subsequent chord shortening: i.e. they could stand to use a softer pole.

Is it possible, that a contributor to Lavillenie's success, and his potentially greater efficiency over Bubka is a result of an increased shortening of the chord of the pole?

I know that this is a result of many of the factors discussed (moment of inertia, angular momentum, energy at takeoff, etc.) but it can also be a matter of proper equipment selection.

There is a lot of folklore in relation to Bubka, so I don't know if there is any truth to this, but I had heard that he more or less should have been holding higher than he was, but instead was using stiffer poles to keep from blowing through (I also heard stories about him trying to bury the standards further back than 80 because he had so much excess horizontal velocity at top). His WR jump at 6.14 (to me at least) seems to somewhat support this fact.

Just food for thought.

If DJ is around he may be able to provide more substantive information.

For most who have vaulted they can remember practice with a short run and low grip height. What happens is that you wind up at times speeding the swing up to make the vault. This cannot be considered ideal and I would further theorize with ideas from the pole experts that Bubka was pushing the limits of pole manufacturing. That he could have used longer and softer poles to better effect/higher grip height, but would have to have adjusted his swing speed over time. That is he would have had to have slowed his early swing down on such poles to enact the vault. He then would have had to adjust to speed to vertical. All in the way Lavillenie does. These things conspired to make Bubka less efficient...

As it was, it's obvious Bubka didn't need to push the envelope in this direction. The old Soviet system rewarded him best for making small increments in the WR. Why fight it?

Will