Above and Beyond: Tim Mack, the Pole Vault, and the Quest for Olympic Gold (review)

Americans love the Olympics. Our champions become instant celebrities who appear on national television shows and see their images immortalized on the fronts of cereal boxes. But such fame is often restricted to the winners of the high-profile glamour sports: swimming, gymnastics, track sprints. Overlooked are the athletes who excel in sports that garner little public interest and meager television exposure. In Above and Beyond: Tim Mack, the Pole Vault, and the Quest for Olympic Gold, Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Bill Livingston addresses that shortcoming by documenting the trials and tribulations of one such obscure Olympic champion, northeastern Ohio native Timothy Mack.

Tim Mack won the pole vault competition at the Athens Olympics in 2004. That accomplishment culminated a remarkable decade-long journey, often characterized by failure and frustration. Livingston adroitly chronicles Mack's uneven career. From a middle-class family in suburban Cleveland, Mack embraced the pole vault at St. Ignatius High School after it had become obvious that he could not compete successfully in baseball or football. He was not an instant success. He failed to qualify for the Ohio state track meet. He then competed in the pole vault at Malone College in Canton, Ohio, the only school that offered him an athletic scholarship. When, after two years, his skills improved, Mack transferred to the University of Tennessee, where he finished his collegiate career working under the tutelage of fabled coach Jim Bemiller. After graduation, he remained in Knoxville and survived by taking a series of menial jobs so that he could continue to train with Bemiller. Although Mack had evolved into a national contender in the pole vault, he failed during the Olympic trials in 1996 and 2000. In 2004, years of toil and perseverance paid off when Mack, at thirty-one, one of the oldest pole-vaulters in international competition, barely qualified for the last spot on the Olympic team at the American trials in Sacramento. At Athens, after a protracted dual with his teammate Toby Stevenson, Mack secured his most unlikely place in sports lore by soaring 19 feet 6 ¼ inches, an Olympic record, on his final jump.

Above and Beyond offers more than a biography of one athlete. Livingston traces the history of pole-vaulting from its origins as an obscure event during the nineteenth century to its present standing in the Olympics. He provides sketches of the sport's most successful champions, including Americans Bob Richards, Don Bragg, and Bob Seagren as well as Ukraine's legendary Sergey Bubka. He reviews the changes to the sport caused by the alterations in the composition of the pole from wood to bamboo to fiberglass. Most important, Livingston suggests that pole-vaulters are elite, multitalented athletes with skills rare to the world of sports. They must possess the speed of sprinters to lift off the ground. They must have the upper-body strength of gymnasts to fly over the bar at increasingly greater elevations. And they must have phenomenal courage to participate in track and field's most risky event.

Indeed, the pole vault might be the world's most dangerous sport, and Livingston confronts that issue by describing the conflict between traditionalists and reformers, who lobby for the mandatory use of helmets and improved landing zones. Especially poignant is Livingston's account of the crusade for reform launched by Ed and Terri Dare whose son, Kevin, died from a fall while pole-vaulting at the Big Ten Indoor Championships in Minneapolis in February 2002.

Livingston has a facile command of language, and he tells his story with an elegant style and considerable humor. In particular, he punctuates his narrative with witty analogies: "His biceps are Popeye's after a spinach infusion" and "At the trials, there were more passes in the pole vault final than in the singles bars around town" (5, 128...