When the Emmanuel Karalis he tried for the first time to pass the 6 m. he had for supporters 80,000 Frenchmen and a handful of fellow travelers who carried him on their shoulders. Two guys in a yellow shirt, a blonde in a blue uniform with an asterisk on his chest, an oriental who saw his medal disappearing and running towards Greece. Everyone applauded and encouraged him as if they were his brothers. “Manolo” dropped the bar, but promised to come back stronger. After all, he didn’t need to round his performance to 6m to climb onto the Olympic podium. Before doing the victory lap for the bronze medal, he received warm congratulations from everyone who saw his back and stayed in the “almost”.
A few minutes later, in the mixed zone of the Stade de France, the Australian colleagues scored his 6th of the match Curtis Marshall (5.85 m.) and they asked him the thing that was troubling everyone’s mind: “But how is it possible for you to support and deify one another? You are competitors and vying for the same medals. We are talking about the final of the Olympic Games”. Marshall smiled broadly under his blond mustache and replied in the Vlach English of the Antipodes: “But who wants hate in their life? Why should we dig our fellow athlete’s pit and why should we wish him harm? We are all brothers, sharing the same sacrifices, flying the same ethers. Today Manolo got a medal, the day before yesterday it was me, the day after tomorrow maybe the kid from Turkey. What do we have to separate? It’s sport, not the rat race.” Bronze at the 2023 World Championships, where Karalis failed, the 27-year-old Marshall has a record of 5.95m. A few days after Paris, he saw the Greek pass him and punch ahead of him in the “six-metre club”.
They were giving him the pace
It happened in Horzów, Poland, which Karalis loves like a third home. “Manolo” knew that he had 6 m at his feet,
hence the confidence with which he raised the bar so high in the Olympic final. As he began his attempt two American jumpers set the pace with enthusiastic applause: the Sam Kendrickssecond in Paris on the unforgettable night of August 5, and o KC Lightfootwith a recent 6.07m but ignominiously disqualified from the American “trials”. Karalis passed the bar without touching it and ran away to celebrate without looking where he was going.
When he opened his eyes, he saw O. waiting for him with open arms Ernest Obienathe Filipino who lost the medal because of Karalis in Paris. Further back, he was waiting for him with clenched fists Mondo Duplantishis alien pole vault champion, Karalis’s age, his podium partner since the two swept the junior championships. Everyone mentioned in the above lists has a personal record that begins with the magic number 6. “Welcome to the club, my friend,” said Duplantis to Karalis, shortly before breaking the world record for the tenth time in his career, a new Bubka for the 21st century. By the time the others reach 6.26m, this rascal will be jumping six and a half meters.
Bubka’s charm 13
The barrier fell on July 13, 1985, coincidentally in Paris, the eve of Bastille Day, in an old stadium called “Jean Bouin”, where today there is a statue of the hero. Already world champion and world record holder with 5.94 m, 21-year-old Sergey Bubka took off and made history with his third attempt. “No one thought we would get this high” he remembers today. “French television christened me the second Gagarin.” Bubka happened to be in Paris, on his way to another rally in Nice. He arrived in the city at 11 a.m. on the morning of the race and accepted the invitation of the organizers more to numb out. He easily won the event with a jump of 5.70m ahead of him Philip Collet and requested that the bar be placed directly at 6 m.
“13 is my lucky number” he joked after glancing at the calendar. Four of the countless world records he broke fell on the 13th of the month. “Also my house in Donetsk is on the 13th floor.” Born and raised in Ukraine, the Olympic Committee of which he was to be president for 17 years, Sergei Nazarovich Bubka was still representing the Soviet Union. Of course, he did not imagine that four decades later his ancestral lands in Luhansk would be set ablaze by the bombs of his former homeland…
“Tough times to be a quickie” Filipino Obiena commented with bitter humor. “Besides the intense competition, we also have a guy who jumps 6m and sweeps the gold medals. We can be motivated by the presence of Duplantis, but we cannot compete with him. For everyone else, the ceiling is silver. I don’t think anything like this has happened before in another era.”
Obiena is too young to remember Bubka’s years of absolute dominance and 35 world records. The Ukrainian “tsar of the ethers” appeared in the stadium when the rest were gathering their bags to return to the locker room. The same thing happened a little later with her Jelena Isinbayeva. Her own women’s world record, 5.06m from 2009 in Zurich, turned 15 the other day. The corresponding “club”, of 5 meters, counts only four ladies: Isinbayeva 5.06 m, Sur 5.03 m, Sidorova 5.01 m, Morris 5.00 p.m. H Katerina Stefanidisdominating the game for five years, never jumped higher than 4.91m.
Emmanuel Karalis is the 29th member of the six-meter group and the only one born with dark skin. In the list we find lost names that refer to old descriptions of it Giannis Diakogiannis (Tarasov, Gataulin, Lukyanenko, Trantenkof, Galfion), the Renault Lavilleni who ten years ago managed to beat Bubka, several Americans, Germans and Australians, a South African, a Pole, one of the brothers Gutormsen who competed in the Paris final, the forgiven Tim Lobinger who “extinguished” at the age of 50 from multiple myeloma, the Sean Barber who left this vain world this year at just 29 years old. But no black people. The Filipino Obiena and the Brazilian Thiago Braz they are the only brunettes in the etherwalker club.
“I was told black people don’t do pole vaulting. Now I am the first black jumper to jump over six meters! Never give up on your dreams,” Karalis wrote in his celebratory post, firing a poisoned arrow at the cave from which racist stereotypes spew. What is he thinking? Dimitris Kyteas seeing the “black man who does voodoo and sex orgies” conquer the planet, fly the Greek flag and light up the country with his smile?
A month before he traveled to Paris for the Olympic Games, Karalis also won the Pan-Hellenic record that had been held for nine years by Kostas Filippidiswith a jump of 5.92 m. Where else? In Poland. In the old stadium “Zdislav Krzyskowiak” in Bydgoszcz, which was rebuilt from the ground up in 2008 and became a doll. Do we really have a stadium suitable for athletics in Greece?
Conquer the world
In the year he is leaving, the flying “Manolo” won a bronze medal at the Olympic Games where he was also flag bearer at the closing ceremony (Paris), silver at the European Championships (Rome) and bronze at the World Indoor Athletics (Glasgow). The 6 meter jump is the icing on the delicious cake.
“Whenever I complete a big jump I feel excitement and joy and a burst of madness” Duplantis confesses. “When everything goes well, I have total control over my body and movements. It’s a feeling I’ll really miss when I stop. Away from the athletics, of course, I want to live my life free and not inside a box. I watch my diet, but I’ll also eat a burger or a bar of chocolate whenever I crave them. It takes mental balance to bring out the best self.”
THE Miltos Tedoglou he was waiting for Karalis at the entrance of the training center in Agios Kosmas. “Come here and I’ll show you”! For the next five minutes the two wrestled down to the mat with Greco-Roman grips that would have been the envy of Kurugliev. “What are you doing baby, are you crazy? Stop, you’re going to dislodge anyone’s shoulders” they were lied to George Pomaski. Two crazy people, two Olympic medals. “Crazy, that’s the key word” comments n Tina Shutey2022 indoor pole vault world runner-up. “You have to be a bit of a badass to jump into the stratosphere with a pole.” And have very good friends around you.
From Cali to Paris
With Duplantis, Karalis shared a podium and a flash for the first time in July 2015 in Cali, where the World Junior Championships (U18) took place. The talent of the two 15-year-olds was overflowing from their trousers and gave them medals: first the Swede with 5.30 m, third the Greek with 5.20 m, “wedge” in second place a compatriot of Bubkas, who later disappeared, named Vladislav Malikhin. In the snapshots from Colombia, the slightly crooked Karalis looks to the future with optimism, while Duplantis, who was already sweeping the records in the children and adolescents, looks like… 15 years old, a high school kid who tomorrow morning has six hours.
The two boys are almost the same age. When the child of the American-Lithuanian sprinter and the Swedish heptathlete saw the first light, the fruit of the love of the Pyrgios decathlete and the worker from Uganda was three weeks old: October 20, 1999 the twins of the Karalis family were born in Athens, November 10, 1999 in Lafayette of Louisiana Armand Gustave Duplantis.
Two years after Kali, Karalis wrested from Duplantis the world record for teenagers by jumping in
5.54m in Jablonec, Czech Republic. But the Swede regained the lead a week later and never looked back. Duplantis became the European champion and soared to 6.05m (in 2018 in Berlin) at the tender age of 18. Karalis achieved the miracle at the Tokyo Olympics, finishing 4th with 5.80m behind Duplantis, Nielsen, Braz, but had to wait until 2023 to celebrate his first medal at men’s level.
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#brotherhood #stake #Duplantis #Karalis #Bubka #Isinbayeva #Stefanidis
