>I am sure that it will >always be a problem for an official to judge whether the vaulter's motive
And that is by far the number one problem with this rule from a judge's perspective. For many of us who got into track & field as teenagers, part of the attraction was no subjectivity in referee's decisions- first to the line wins, farthest throw wins, bar stays on or falls off, and so on. No ifs ands or buts about it. Well believe it or not that same logic is attractive to officials too! When I was officiating some of my fellow officials were also high school football or basketball officials, and they HATED having to make subjective calls which were always booed by fans on one side of the field or the other. Officials in those sports just cannot win. In comparison, track & field has always been much more black & white, and officials have been more respected in most cases. The most difficult thing (years back) was calling flat throws in the javelin- that evoked many arguments from coaches that we were sometimes 'picking' on one of their athletes by calling all their throws flat! :-) When the 'volzing' rule came out and included that 'intention to dislodge the bar' kind of language, that evoked more arguments in off-season officials clinics than I've ever seen. Some officials absolutely refused to try to discern intent. "What am I supposed to do, read his mind?" was a typical comment. Others tried to invent their own interpretation that wasn't even in the rulebook- like if the athlete grips the bar it's a miss, otherwise it's not clear enough to raise a red flag. The easiest way for the IAAF to clean this up is to be extremely explicit in what constitutes a violation, and take out ALL language referring to 'intent', 'motive', 'for the purpose of', and so forth. That kind of language just leads to interpretation problems, second-guessing by TV commentators with the advantage of slow-mo-replay, and so on. Don't forget that officials are also supposed to make these calls from an angled position almost 20 feet below the plane of the crossbar! RT
