> Could better spotting have prevented Dare's death?
No
> What is the role of the pole-catcher at meets? I'm aware that pole vault
officials aren't allowed to intercept poles falling in certain directions,
> lest they protect the bar illegally. But I've seen officials catch poles
to prevent them from conking people on the head as they fall. Or they
>catch poles to prevent them from breaking.
>
> Are officials ever in position to break the fall of a vaulter? If so,
have they ever protected a falling vaulter?
I imagine it's happened before, but it would be incredibly stupid for an
official to do that. Odds are that the official would cause more harm than
good and probably get hurt himself.
The fact remains that if a vaulter is vaulting properly, the chances of
landing off the pads on anything other than his/her feet is astronomically
low. As we heard this weekend, however, it's not impossible. Most vaulters
quickly develop a sense of how far they've penetrated on any given vault at
the end of the drive phase, and will not complete the swing to the inverted
position if they sense they are over the box. Most vaulters actually bail
out when they don't need to, as opposed to getting upside down when they
shouldn't.
In 1990, high schools implemented a rule requiring that the bar had to be
set at least 12 inches towards the landng area from the pads. This was to
reduce the chances of exactly the type of accident that happened this
weekend. Good vaulters nearly always set the bar quite a ways back from the
box, because a proper vault involves a strong drive phase to bring the
vaulter well over the pads.
I don't know all the specifics of the injury this weekend, but in all
likelihood, several different things went wrong at once. There are vaulters
who have vaulted hundreds of thousands of times in practice in a career and
have not landed on their head in the box. This weekend was a terrible
tragedy, but it probably could not have been prevented other than by
abolishing the vault. I should also note that I do not believe that
vaulting with a non-bendable pole reduces the chance of landing on your head
in the box. In fact, with a non-bendable pole, the hands are more likely to
slip as you are taking off, so it is probably MORE likely that this type of
accident would occur with a non-bendable pole. Fiberglass poles taken as a
whole do have a bit more risk than the old-style poles, but not for this
type of injury.
- Ed Parrot
