World Record or Olympic Gold Medal?
Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 12:20 pm
Which would you rather have?
http://www.cleveland.com/sports/plainde ... xml&coll=2
Track and field goal depends on athlete
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Bill Livingston
Plain Dealer Columnist
Olympic gold medal or world record - which would you rather have?
The answer might be that most people would take either one, no questions asked. To elite track and field athletes, however, it's a problem of considerably more importance than the tastes great/less filling schism that divides most of us.
There was, after all, only one Jesse Owens, who set three world records and tied a fourth in one afternoon in the 1935 Big Ten championship meet. He then won four gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics while Adolf Hitler's mustache twitched nervously.
Yet consider Sergey Bubka, the Ukrainian pole vaulter who won six World Championships in a row and still holds all the records for the event, some of them more than a decade old. He remains the only 20-foot (6.10 meters) pole vaulter in history.
Bubka won only one Olympic pole vaulting gold medal. It was a testament both to the nature of the event as a crapshoot on a catapult and to the insane difficulty of beating the best in the world on a given day once every four years on the world's biggest stage.
On the same day this week as Jamaica's Asafa Powell broke one of the track and field's most glamorous records with a 9.77-second 100 meters, I asked two great Ohio track and field athletes which they would choose.
"The Olympic gold medal," said Tim Mack of Westlake, the pole vault gold medalist in the 2004 Olympics in Greece.
"The world record," said Harry "Butch" Reynolds of Akron, the silver medalist in the 400 meters in the 1988 Olympics in South Korea and for 11 years the holder of the 400 meters world record.
Mack, a career journeyman, worked eight long years after reaching the national- and world-class levels to become an overnight sensation. He set an Olympic record of 19 feet, 6¼ inches - better even than Bubka at the Games - on his third and final attempt to win the gold in an upset of fellow American Toby Stevenson.
"It's a tough question, but I would take the gold medal because nobody can ever take it away from you," Mack said.
It is, with apologies to soccer's World Cup, the most recognizable athletic bauble in the world.
Nonetheless, Mack continued to vault across Europe and Asia after the Olympics, both because he was hotter than Annika Sorenstam in an LPGA major and because he felt he would be considered a fluke winner until he vaulted 6 meters (19-8¼). He cleared 6.01 (19-8½) in Monaco late in the season, becoming the 12th man all-time to clear the 6-meter mark.
"I needed it for validation," Mack said.
For his part, Reynolds, now the strength, flexibility and nutrition coach for football at Ohio State, his alma mater, still replays his loss to Steve Lewis in Seoul.
"I relaxed in the second 100. I made the greatest kick of my life in the last 100 meters, but I got beat on the lean at the finish," said Reynolds, who was known for his gangbusters finishes.
He got a gold medal as a member of the USA's 4x400 relay team, but it wasn't the same. Reynolds chased his dream of individual gold for three more Olympiads. He was worn down at the Olympic Trials by his fight against international track and field authorities over a probable botched drug test in 1992. He cramped up in 1996 in his semifinal heat at the Atlanta Olympics. He could not outrun age in 2000.
He always will be remembered, though, for breaking Lee Evans' 20-year old high-altitude mark by .57 seconds in Switzerland in 1988 with a 43.29 clocking.
"When Michael Johnson broke my record, it was by .11 seconds," Reynolds said. "You can't even set your watch that fast. Breaking the world record, and by so much, was the best thing ever to happen to me. As [the Browns'] Jim Brown told me, people can argue about who was the best running back ever. Maybe it was him, maybe it was Gale Sayers or O.J. Simpson. But one thing about setting a world record, you know who the best is."
As far as the best ever, when former Ohio State football star Todd Bell died this year, one of the footnotes to his athletic career was that he broke the Ohio high school long jump record at the Mansfield Relays with a leap of 25-2 in 1977. The old record of 24-9 had been set by Owens in, ahem, 1933.
World War II kept Owens from repeating his Olympic glory. Nobody gets to have it all, but he came close.
http://www.cleveland.com/sports/plainde ... xml&coll=2
Track and field goal depends on athlete
Sunday, June 19, 2005
Bill Livingston
Plain Dealer Columnist
Olympic gold medal or world record - which would you rather have?
The answer might be that most people would take either one, no questions asked. To elite track and field athletes, however, it's a problem of considerably more importance than the tastes great/less filling schism that divides most of us.
There was, after all, only one Jesse Owens, who set three world records and tied a fourth in one afternoon in the 1935 Big Ten championship meet. He then won four gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics while Adolf Hitler's mustache twitched nervously.
Yet consider Sergey Bubka, the Ukrainian pole vaulter who won six World Championships in a row and still holds all the records for the event, some of them more than a decade old. He remains the only 20-foot (6.10 meters) pole vaulter in history.
Bubka won only one Olympic pole vaulting gold medal. It was a testament both to the nature of the event as a crapshoot on a catapult and to the insane difficulty of beating the best in the world on a given day once every four years on the world's biggest stage.
On the same day this week as Jamaica's Asafa Powell broke one of the track and field's most glamorous records with a 9.77-second 100 meters, I asked two great Ohio track and field athletes which they would choose.
"The Olympic gold medal," said Tim Mack of Westlake, the pole vault gold medalist in the 2004 Olympics in Greece.
"The world record," said Harry "Butch" Reynolds of Akron, the silver medalist in the 400 meters in the 1988 Olympics in South Korea and for 11 years the holder of the 400 meters world record.
Mack, a career journeyman, worked eight long years after reaching the national- and world-class levels to become an overnight sensation. He set an Olympic record of 19 feet, 6¼ inches - better even than Bubka at the Games - on his third and final attempt to win the gold in an upset of fellow American Toby Stevenson.
"It's a tough question, but I would take the gold medal because nobody can ever take it away from you," Mack said.
It is, with apologies to soccer's World Cup, the most recognizable athletic bauble in the world.
Nonetheless, Mack continued to vault across Europe and Asia after the Olympics, both because he was hotter than Annika Sorenstam in an LPGA major and because he felt he would be considered a fluke winner until he vaulted 6 meters (19-8¼). He cleared 6.01 (19-8½) in Monaco late in the season, becoming the 12th man all-time to clear the 6-meter mark.
"I needed it for validation," Mack said.
For his part, Reynolds, now the strength, flexibility and nutrition coach for football at Ohio State, his alma mater, still replays his loss to Steve Lewis in Seoul.
"I relaxed in the second 100. I made the greatest kick of my life in the last 100 meters, but I got beat on the lean at the finish," said Reynolds, who was known for his gangbusters finishes.
He got a gold medal as a member of the USA's 4x400 relay team, but it wasn't the same. Reynolds chased his dream of individual gold for three more Olympiads. He was worn down at the Olympic Trials by his fight against international track and field authorities over a probable botched drug test in 1992. He cramped up in 1996 in his semifinal heat at the Atlanta Olympics. He could not outrun age in 2000.
He always will be remembered, though, for breaking Lee Evans' 20-year old high-altitude mark by .57 seconds in Switzerland in 1988 with a 43.29 clocking.
"When Michael Johnson broke my record, it was by .11 seconds," Reynolds said. "You can't even set your watch that fast. Breaking the world record, and by so much, was the best thing ever to happen to me. As [the Browns'] Jim Brown told me, people can argue about who was the best running back ever. Maybe it was him, maybe it was Gale Sayers or O.J. Simpson. But one thing about setting a world record, you know who the best is."
As far as the best ever, when former Ohio State football star Todd Bell died this year, one of the footnotes to his athletic career was that he broke the Ohio high school long jump record at the Mansfield Relays with a leap of 25-2 in 1977. The old record of 24-9 had been set by Owens in, ahem, 1933.
World War II kept Owens from repeating his Olympic glory. Nobody gets to have it all, but he came close.
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