Track & Field: The Borrowed Pole

TRACK & FIELD

If it had not been for a castoff television aerial, John Pennel, 23, might be a ditchdigger today. He used to dig holes for fun on his father’s farm in Tennessee. “I left holes all over the farm,” he says. “I don’t know why I did it. I just had this urge.” Then he found an old roof top TV aerial and, using it as a sort of vaulting pole, began to go up instead of down. One leap led to another, and in 1959 he went to Northeast Louisiana State College on a pole-vaulting scholarship (room, board, tuition, $20 a month for “laundry”).

The next good thing that happened to Pennel was that he broke his favorite fiber glass pole during practice last March. At that point, he was an unknown; the highest he had ever vaulted was a middling 15 ft. 9 in. But on March 23, using a seemingly identical fiber glass pole that he borrowed from a rival vaulter (Rice University’s Fred Hansen), Pennel soared 16 ft. 3 in. and broke the world record. He is still using that pole. Last week, at the U.S. v. Great Britain track meet in London, Pennel cleared the crossbar at 16 ft. 10¼ in., bettering his own most recent world record of 16 ft. 8¾ in., set ten days earlier.

A practitioner of the hold-on-for-dear-life, catapult-like technique of vaulting with fiber glass, Pennel used a long, 154-ft. approach “for speed,” a high grip on the pole “for a bigger bend.” He is aiming now for a 17-ft. vault and a gold medal in the 1964 Olympics. “I don’t want to sound overconfident,” he says, “but I think 17 ft. is within my reach.” One little difficulty may interfere: after last week’s meet Pennel noticed a crack in his borrowed pole. “I’m not going to worry,” he shrugs. “I’ll just keep jumping with it until it breaks.”