Track & Field: Exercise in Physics

Springtime is full of transitory delights: the rookie who bats .400 in May and learns all about curves in June, the horse that wins six straight in California but turns out to be allergic to bluegrass in Kentucky. Fred Hansen’s destiny seems more secure, if for no other reason than the fact that it has taken him years to get much of anywhere at all. A virtual unknown when he showed up for the big spring meets, Pole Vaulter Hansen, 23, startled track experts by leaping 17 ft. 1 in. in Houston last month, breaking John Pennel’s world record by ¼ in. Week after in San Diego, Hansen did it again, soaring over the bar at 17 ft. 2 in., and beating Pennel himself. Last week he handily won the A.A.U. championships at Rutgers with a 17-ft. vault, then barely missed at a towering 17 ft. 6¾ in.

Trouble with Glass. Hansen has been vaulting ever since he was a sixth grader in Cuero, Texas. “It’s always fascinated me,” he says, “because it isn’t something that everybody can do. I fixed me up an old cane pole and started working out. At first, I only did distance jumping, to see how far I could go from one spot to another, using the pole to boost me along. Then my father built me a regular pit out of sand, and I was hooked.” In high school, Hansen jumped 13 ft. 6 in. with a Swedish steel pole, went on to 14 ft. in his sophomore year at Rice University. After that he joined the parade to the catapult-like fiber glass pole and ran into trouble. “It took me forever to get used to it,” he says. “I didn’t really learn to bend the pole until this year.” In mid-May at Modesto, Calif., he hit 16 ft. 4½ in.—and he has not been that low since.

For a man who makes his mark with muscle, Hansen owns a busy head. He already has spent five years in college, has a degree in business administration, plus a year of predental science. He is an apostle of Norman Vincent Peale (“He’s got the right idea about things”), and he talks about vaulting as though it were mostly an exercise in practical physics. He grips his 16-ft. Silaflex pole as near the end as possible, uses a long, 140-ft. approach to gain the velocity necessary to give “a maximum bend at the vertical position. I’m trying to translate linear force into vertical force,” he says, and he is hard at work on an essay entitled “Compound Pendulum Mechanics of Pole Vaulting.”

Horse & Rings. Like most top vaulters of the fiber glass era, Hansen is a jumper-gymnast. He works out as much as four hours a day—on the trampoline, the long horse and the flying rings, lifts weights, does isometric exercises. He has even dieted down from 175 Ibs. to 167 Ibs. on the sensible theory that the lighter he is, the less work he has to do to get himself up where he wants to go. At night he watches home movies of his rivals in action, says proudly that “they probably have movies of me too.”

And, maybe most important, he is learning to curb his generosity. Until he smashed the record last month, Hansen’s main claim to fame was that he lent John Fennel the pole he used to set the old record of 17 ft. ¾in. From now on, Fennel will have to buy his own. Says Hansen: “You know, he never did give that darned pole back.”