JUMPS AND THE POLE - VAULT In the jumping events " form " is an element almost as important as " spring " and " sand." A high jumper must master the technique of clearing the bar if he hopes to do justice to his strength and courage, and, other things being equal, from four to six inches may be added to the height he can jump merely by changing from a natural, haphazard to a " scientific " method. The broad jumper must have spring and he must have speed, but if he does not know how to strike the take-off squarely and with perfect confidence, his physical advantages will go to naught. The pole-vault, although not strictly a jumping event in the same sense that the high and broad jump are, is obvi ously a " trick " event, and one in which form is a prime essential.
The importance of " sand " in jumping is some thing which a great many people are likely to belittle or quite forget. Jumping seems to be a quiet, one-man sort of amusement, freed from the clash and strain of contest, where a fighting edge is of comparatively little account. As a matter of fact, there is no athletic event, from the mile run to a prize fight, where it is more literally true than it is, for example, in the high jump, that a man can do what he believes he can do— where " sand " of a certain sort is more necessary, for the simple reason that the element of personal conflict is removed, and the only enemy one has to fight is abstract height—the number of feet and inches that were cleared by one's opponent. There lies the bar at what seems an impossible distance from the ground. Let the jumper falter for the minutest fraction of a second at the take-off, think that he is going to miss, and failure is certain. Let him believe with all his might that he will go over, and as he leaves the ground a quick some thing will often seem to wing his feet and lift him above the impossible. The jump, high or broad, is very particularly one of those things in which you hitch your wagon to a star in order to clear an extra inch.
An illustration which occurs to the writer of the potency of a fighting edge in even so mild a contest as the high jump was the jumping of Kernan of Harvard, at the Oxford-Cambridge Harvard-Yale games, at Berkeley Oval, in the autumn of 1901. Spraker of Yale had won the
event with a leap of 6 feet i i inches. Rotch of Harvard, jumping like music, but ineffectively, had dropped out at considerably below what he had often jumped before. Kernan, with all his heavy half-back's weight, kept going. He jumped like a hippopotamus. Invariably he knocked the bar down on the first two trials, but on the third and last he quite as invariably came up to the scratch and heaved himself over. He lost almost all his momentum before reaching the take-off, he took the latter sprawling, and yet, by sheer strength, sand, and determination, he lifted his big body over the bar. One by one his more accomplished opponents dropped out, and at the end he had won, with the bar at 6 feet 2 inch. It is just this ability to do well in competition, to beat one's best, that makes a jumper, as it does a miler or sprinter. The jump is not at all the feat of a virtuoso, a sort of athleticized parlor trick.
To the ordinary non-athletic observer there is something startling in the magic by which any one, by the mere spring of his unaided muscles, can throw his whole body over a bar higher than his head. The performance is indeed remarkable, but in casually watching it, the average observer does not notice a fact which reduces somewhat the apparent impossibility of the feat. The jumper, it must be remembered, does not jump straight into the air, so that when his feet are clearing the bar his head is his body's length above it, but passes over the bar parallel to it, and with his body almost horizontal. It is only the soles of his shoes, therefore, which really are lifted to the distance at which the bar is set. His head travels upward only a few feet, or perhaps even only a few inches ; and in perfect jumping form, so far as any upward motion is concerned, his head is almost as stationary as though it were hinged to an imaginary point and the body were a rod, which was flung upward and over the bar.