When Holly Bradshaw launched herself over a 16ft bar on a wobbly length of fibreglass she became the first Briton to win an Olympic medal by such means. Finally, after 125 years, pole vaulting’s coming home. The sport has been in the Games since 1896, but the cradle of the discipline was the Cumbrian toFwn of Ulverston. I learn this from a piece for Inside the Games by David Owen, which says that in the 1880s the world’s best vaulter — “the Sergey Bubka of the Furness peninsula” — was Tom Ray, who set several world records, peaking at 11ft 8½ in.
He was following Edwin Woodburn, also of Ulverston, the first to clear 11ft. Others did just as well but the local technique was banned by the Olympics and Britain didn’t enter the event until 1924. It is said the sport developed in Ulverston as a way for cricketers to get from their remote ground over high walls to the pub. These days vaulters try to clear the bar not reach it.
All of which reminds me of the story about the spectator at the Olympics who sees an athlete carrying a tube twice his height and asks: “Are you a pole vaulter?” To which the athlete replies: “Nein, I am a German. But how did you know my name was Walter?”
GOLDEN BOY
Yesterday’s cycling results increased the lead that a couple from Knutsford have over the second most populous nation on Earth. In Olympic history, India (population: 1.4 billion, give or take) has won nine golds, while the Kenny family (population: three) has won 11. Laura and Jason’s four-year-old son Albie is yet to pull his weight, but he’ll be old enough to win skateboarding gold in 2028.
HOUSEHOLD NAME
Celebrities have odd motivations for becoming famous. Barbra Streisand’s was to get out of doing housework. When the American performer first left home, she didn’t know how to make a bed. “I couldn’t figure it out, with the corners and stuff,” she tells Waitrose Weekend, “so I thought to myself, ‘I have to make it, so I can get somebody else to make my bed.’” Two Oscars and nine Grammys later, she boasts: “I still don’t make my own bed.” And I thought she was rather good at doing covers.
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Boris Johnson’s comment this week about how Thatcher had done her bit to tackle climate change by closing so many pits went down as well as a canary in a coalmine. With many crying outrage, one Blairite kept some perspective. John McTernan, former political secretary in Downing Street, said: “I feel sorry that Arthur Scargill’s contribution to decarbonising the UK is being overlooked.”
VANISHING ACT
More than 45 years after John Stonehouse set an unbeatable record for open-water swimming, walking into the sea off Miami and emerging in Melbourne, two books about the Labour MP who faked his death have been written by relatives. Depending whether you read the one by his daughter or his great-nephew he was tragically misunderstood or a massive fraud.
A BBC drama is on the way, written by John Preston, who did the recent one about Jeremy Thorpe. Julian Hayes, the great-nephew, tells LBC he hopes it is better than the “half-baked attempt” made in 1993. It was so terrible, he says, his mother rang Stonehouse’s former wife to check she was all right and found she had laughed all the way through it.
