Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

The jumps and the Pole-Vault 361 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 I 90 r. Spraker of Yale had won the event with a leap of 6 feet 1t inches. Rotch of Harvard, jumping like music, but ineffectively, had dropped out at considerably below what he