Clayton, California –will celebrate the international achievements of two young homegrown athletes when Kara Kohler and Kristian Ipsen are feted with a parade Sept. 15 to recognize their bronze medals at the London Olympics this month. There’s one person in Clayton who knows what those athletes were going through Aug. 1 in their Olympic finals.In fact, local resident Don Bragg can even top Ipsen and Kohler, as 52 years ago next Friday on Sept 7, 1960, Don Bragg won the Olympic gold medal in the pole vault at the Rome Summer Games while setting an Olympic record to beat fellow American Ron Morris.Don and Theresa Bragg moved to Clayton in 1996 and live just a block or so from Main Street where the Sept. 15 parade will be held.The Rome Olympics were contested at the height of the Cold War and it was the Soviet Union that dominated the meet, winning 32 more medals than the United States on the athletic battlefield. The Games came just two years before the Cuban Missile Crisis. They were the last Olympics in which apartheid South Africa was allowed to compete and the second of three Olympics where East and West Germany had a combined team.The contrasts between 1960 and 2012 Games are staggering. Rome was the first Olympics telecast to North America. CBS paid $394,000 for the TV rights (about $3 million in today’s dollars).    Continue reading →

Back in the fall of 1976, maybe as early as spring of 1975, I remember meeting Bruce Jenner. He was this guy who was constantly working out at San Jose City College. The campus was about 2 1/2 miles from our high school, Bellarmine Prep in San Jose.  My training partners, Bob Lucas, Pete Dolan and I would do our easy runs through the streets of San Jose, hurdling bushes, to keep ourselves from nodding off. We would see this guy throwing the discus on a lunch run. Then, later in the day, we would see him still working out as we were finishing a second run or perhaps a some quarters on the City College track. Not all was easy for Jenner. He had no money. He lived in a small apartment in San Jose, coached by Bert Bonanno at SJCC. Jenner was the beast master, the guy worked out all day. Jenner no heighted in the pole vault one time. That happens when you are a real athlete.  Later, I was able to spend time with him as he and other other American gold medalists supported the VISA Decathlon program, which gave Dan 0′Brien, Dave Johnson, Steve Fritz, Chris Huffins the encouragement that they needed to stay with an event that is much a part of America’s Olympic history.We knew about him. Jenner was a decathlete. Jenner was an Olympian. He was, in our eyes, a real athlete. I had seen him in Visions of Eight, a Bud Greenspan movie on the 1972 Olympics where he had placed tenth, I believe, knowing that his day was ahead of him. video:
http://www.runblogrun.com/2012/08/the-shoe-addicts-present-bruce-jenner-olympic-legend-series-a-video-by-the-shoe-addicts-note-by-larr.html
  

This summer, Becky Arbiv, an eighth grader at The Epstein School placed first in qualifying pole vault at the 2012 USA Track and Field Region 3 Junior Olympic Track and Field Championships.She went on to place seventh in the nation with a 9 foot 2 inch pole vault.Near the end of last school year, Becky competed in the 2012 Georgia State Middle School Championships, where she placed second in high jump, second in pole vault and sixth in 300 meter hurdles   more