CITIUS, altius, craziest? The Olympic motto might just have to be amended if Neil Buckfield continues his rise into the pole vaulting stratosphere.
The Englishman, who broke the UK record earlier this month, has vowed to try for another, a week tomorrow at the Kelvin Hall, in the McDonald's International against France.
Despite the fact that no Briton has ever won an Olympic pole vault medal of any colour, Buckfield believes he can win gold in Sydney, four years from now, by which time he expects to be clearing six metres, a height only previously achieved by three athletes.
These laudable ambitions are not what make him crazy, yet how else to describe someone who has been known to hang by the fingertips from a window-sill, several floors above ground? Crazier still, the deputy head master of an English school has quit teaching to coach him full time.
In pole vaulting, that is, not window-sill dreeping.
Buckfield revealed his esoteric pursuit yesterday when assessing the Glasgow venue. ``It was some years ago - I did it just to show off. It was pretty silly, but pole vaulters are show-offs. We do silly things - the whole event is silly.''
Okkert Britz, the South African six-metre vaulter with whom Buckfield will train this winter, has an identical party-piece, but Buckfield can claim to have perfected the stunt some years before him.
And silly or not, his event looks likely to bring the AAA champion a better quality of life than the sports science and religious studies course from which he dropped out at university.
Last year, his first full-time season, he broke the 14-year-old UK outdoor best with 5.70 metres (well above the roof of a double decker bus) while this month, he took the 15-year-old indoor mark, with 5.61.
``I hope to do 5.85 this year outdoors,'' he said. ``At 5.80, you start earning serious appearance money, and at 5.85 or 5.90, you could retire for life after a couple of years.''
At the moment, however, he is still a poor relation internationally. Ceiling girders in his home training venue, at Horsham, are so low he cannot carry the pole properly. ``That's why I'm looking forward to competing in Glasgow. It's a great facility.''
For serious training, he visits a centre at Vincennes, in France, twice a year. A full-size indoor 400m arena surrounds an international cycle arena and separate 200m running track, with two vault beds, perhaps explaining why the French have five of the world's top 13 vaulters ever.
Both his rivals next week, Alain Andji and Jean-Marc Tailhardat, have cleared 5.70m - yet Tailhardat, in clearing 5.60m last weekend, was only fourth at the French indoor championships.
British vaulting, Buckfield says ``has been a joke. Now that I've come through, I hope it gets a kick up the backside.''
He, and coach Peter Sutcliffe, have gone full-time thanks to theatrical impressario Eddie Kulukundis. Despite substantial losses in the Lloyds crash, he still privately funds many of the nation's brightest prospects.
Buckfield, as a junior, had a serious fall, missing the mat and landing in the box. ``I could not move, and thought I had broken my back,'' he recalls. He was rushed to hospital, a frantic father by his side, but suffered nothing worse than serious bruising.
However, it underlines the risk of quitting teaching, taken last month, at 49, for the role of pole-vault coach, but Sutcliffe has identified a once-in-a-lifetime prospect.
Certainly the protege he spotted as a 2.40m, 14-year-old, has the aptitude to make headlines for the right reasons. No matter what he achieves, he will not even be the first vaulter to appear on a mural at his home sports centre, which is adorned by an action pose of Michael Edwards, who made the front page of a tabloid newspaper, having appeared in what was conservatively described as a ``sex frolic'' with a nightclub stripper while in Barcelona to compete in the World Cup. He was subsequently disciplined. By the athletics team, not the stripper.
Then there was former UK champion Jeff Gutteridge, first British athlete to be banned for drug taking, while Keith Stock, Buckfield's predecessor as UK outdoor record-holder, is serving six years for drug-trafficking and theft.
Scotland's vaulters have been only marginally less colourful. David Stevenson, still seventh in the Scottish all-time lists 28 years after competing in the Tokio Olympics, used to carry his poles in carboard tubes on top of his Triumph sports car. Stopped by police inquiring about his strange cargo, he told them not to open the tubes, as the table tennis balls inside would bounce all over the motorway.
Former Commonwealth medallist Graham Eggleton lived on a houseboat - a derelict hulk he dredged from the bottom of the Thames and renovated himself. A blond-haired piratical figure, a cross between a Viking and a Haight Ashbury hippy, he decided a parrot in a cage would be an appropriate prop.
``I saw a beautiful antique cage, bought it, then discovered parrots were really expensive. I had to get a cockatiel instead. It could not speak, and ruined the image.'' He still holds the Scottish record, 5.21m, dating back to 1982.
Tickets for Kelvin Hall are available by calling 0141 337 1806.
q ALISON Curbishley, the Anglo who makes her senior UK debut with Sally Gunnell over 400m in the match, has been told that despite not having the UK qualifying time, she may join Mel Neef in the European Indoor Championship team. She has to match the form shown when setting a Scottish junior record this month.
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