Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

Track Athletics 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 t 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