It might sound hard to believe but the wedding gift that I received is a pole vault landing bed! This is also the largest and most expensive gift I ever received from anyone!

Here’s the story. My wife and I are both pole vaulters and our teammates gave us a brand new pole vault bed as our wedding gift! They even went as far as insisting us to use it as our bed! The bed is so huge that although it could still fit into our room, it took up almost 80% of the floor space.

As to why they gave us such a weird and out of this world wedding gift, they said that we are a pole vaulting couple and therefore should have a pole vault bed as our bed, so that our babies would be good pole vaulters in the future as well! lol

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One of the big problems for pole vaulters is the run-in to the bar and Swedish phenomenon Angelica Bengtsson has been working on precisely that aspect of her event in the close season.

On Wednesday in a press conference to launch her indoor campaign, she revealed that one of the main improvements she has made is to change her shoes.

Before, she was using pole vault shoes but has now changed to normal sprinting shoes which are less rigid.

She has also changed the heel support to improve the situation.

The issue first came to light at last winter’s Stockholm indoors at the Globe arena. Despite setting three records, the 17 year old turned out to be the slowest of the competitors on the run-in.

It was only on her record jumps that her speed was better: “It was only on the record jumps that I accelerated at the end,” she said.

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In a startling development, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) announced today that henceforth new rules will apply to the management of student athletes in the four major sports, baseball, basketball, football and hockey. The rules will also partially apply to the minor sports, e.g. tennis, swimming, track & field.

The new policies will be published by Christmas, but a spokesperson who insisted on anonymity, disclosed the major features of the policy today.

Athletes recruited from high schools will be required to sign a lifetime service contract with the NCAA. Under this contract the athlete will be bound to the NCAA for his or her full active life in organized sports. Professional teams will no longer be able to draft athletes. They will have to purchase the services of these athletes from the NCAA or the respective college or university. After graduation from college, the athlete will receive a portion of the “salary” paid by the professional team, probably 30%. The NCAA will provide full insurance coverage during the athlete’s service in school or in a professional league. In the event of a life threatening or career threatening injury, the athlete’s contract will be automatically terminated

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“My coach said, ‘You’re fast and you’re strong, so why don’t you pole-vault?’ ” Ferrandino said.

Soon he was soaring over high bars; he later became captain of the track team.

But Ferrandino still had one of his greatest obstacles ahead. He worried what his family would say when they learned he was gay, something he was trying to accept himself

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England — AT THIS time of year you’d expect Steve Lewis to be forgetting all about turkey – but the Stoke-on-Trent pole vaulter is doing anything but insisting the World Indoor Championships in Istanbul will be the perfect way to prepare for London 2012.

The 25-year-old was left with nowhere to go last season as, having put his hand and knee injuries behind him, he finished ninth in a high-quality final at the World Championships in Daegu in August. That performance, that saw Lewis equal his campaign’s best on the big stage, left him buzzing but with the season almost at a close, it was straight back into winter’s training and not competition. But rather than dwell on his disappointment, Lewis, who claimed Commonwealth Games silver in 2010, has set about honing his skills under the roof with the intentions of improving upon his sixth place two years ago.

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If you are involved with high school or college sports, then Frederick Mueller, a professor of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina, has probably had some kind of impact on the safety precautions you follow or teach.

Dr. Mueller deserves much of the credit for the fact that injuries to student athletes have decreased greatly since the 1970s. As head of the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research for the past 31 years, he has worked to collect information on injuries that happen to athletes at the high school and college levels each year, and to make recommendations for changes to safety standards and coaching practices.

Every time a high school student dies while playing sports, Dr. Mueller calls the student’s coaches and parents, in an effort to better understand what happened, so that that information can help others. And every year, his Center’s report on the previous year’s fatalities and serious injuries is the only comprehensive information source on this topic.

Some of Dr. Mueller’s greatest successes have been with the sports of pole vaulting and swimming. In 1982, one of the center’s first annual reports included the fact that four pole vaulters had died in one year.

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