Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

374 Track Athletics which requires more of deftness and knack than of strength, and even a comparative duffer can make a jump which seems to the casual eye a good one. Delvers in athletic arch~ology have advanced the opinion that the pole-vault is the outgrowth of the purely utilitarian aid to locomo– tion employed by the natives of Cambridgeshire in England to vault over the network of drains that cross the great Bedford Level - which may be true, although it is quite as likely that the sport had no such specific and localized source. However this may be, it seems to have attained as legitimate a place in field athletics as any of the less "fancy" events. In the pole-vault a man of height is at a dis– tinct advantage. His natural grip on the pole is at a greater height than the shorter man's, and he approaches the bar, therefore, at a handier angle, and provided he has the strength and cleverness he ought to be able to lift himself over the bar with correspondingly greater ease. This was par– ticularly true of the old method of pole-vault– ing, where the hands kept their position on the pole in contrast with the English style of climb– ing the pole, hand over hand, while in the air. Nowadays the best American pole-vaulters slip the lower hand up after the pole has been thrust into the ground, so that both hands are together on the pole at a distance slightly above the point