Mondo Duplantis is the only high school vaulter to
have cleared 19 feet, and he has done it twice this year.“He’s the Tiger Woods of pole vaulting.”
.. His father was an all-American pole-vaulter who jumped 19 feet 1/4 inch as a professional. His mother, Helena, a native of Sweden, was a heptathlete and volleyball player. His eldest brother, Andreas, finished as high as third at the Southeastern Conference indoor vaulting championships. The family’s middle son, Antoine, played in the Little League World Series in 2005 and is now an outfielder at L.S.U., having recently set a school record with six hits in a game.
.. At 17, Duplantis is not ready to travel regularly around the world to compete, his father said.
“He may be a good enough pole-vaulter, but he needs a little more formal and life education to do it,” Greg Duplantis said. “We’ll see this time next year.”
.. At first glance, Duplantis, thin and rangy at 5 feet 10 inches and 145 pounds, does not appear to be a world-class vaulter. Many are taller than 6 feet and heavier. But he can dunk a basketball, his father said, and has long-jumped 23 feet 3 inches. He also runs the anchor leg on Lafayette High’s 4×100-meter relay; his split has been hand-timed at 10.55 seconds.
.. He has developed strength specific to his event, in part, by hanging upside down, like a bat, in the backyard and doing inverted pull-ups, using a device fashioned from a rope, foot straps, weights and a pulley.
.. A technique favored by many vaulters is to drive the front knee high and let the trail leg swing upward like a pendulum. But Duplantis believes he generates more momentum by swinging both legs in a retro style employed by vaulters who once used rigid poles made of bamboo and aluminum.
.. And he has the speed, strength and technique to bend and control the recoil of poles designed for vaulters as heavy as 195 pounds — 50 above his own weight.
85-Year-Old Marathoner Is So Fast That Even Scientists Marvel
Even though Whitlock’s Prince Valiant hair has long grown white and thin, a photograph of him running in his early 20s shows a physique remarkably similar to his octogenarian build, Hepple said.
“It really is an astounding picture,” he said. “Normally a person of Ed’s age might lose a third to 40 percent of their muscle mass over that span. For him to have more or less the same mass as he had in his 20s, that’s really something.”
.. His marathon time at age 85, 3:56:34, is more than an hour slower than the 2:54:48 he ran in Toronto at age 73 in what is widely considered his greatest masters race.
The N.B.A.’s ‘Turkish Thunder’ Excels at a Painful Task
.. None of this happens by accident. Ilyasova studies game film and scouting reports. He knows which players tend to go to their left after they pump fake. And he knows which players are poor outside shooters, giving him the leeway to back off and bait them into driving. He can usually sense where they want to go. His job is to get there first.
.. “I wish there was a stat line for charges,” he said. “It should count as a block or a steal or something like that.”
.. If the defender takes the brunt of the contact between his shoulder blades, in the chest, Strom told Javie, there is a good chance that he was the first player to the spot.
.. Javie cited Dennis Rodman and Shane Battier as two former players who were exceptionally skilled at drawing charges. Rodman had the quickest feet in the league, Javie said.
Michael Novak Crafted a Moral Defense of Democratic Capitalism
Philosopher served as ambassador under Reagan and impressed Thatcher
His philosophical heroes included Reinhold Niebuhr, Gabriel Marcel and Albert Camus... Recruited to teach at Stanford University in the mid-1960s, he joined protests against the Vietnam War, though he wavered over the years on whether U.S. involvement was justified. “I came out of it feeling that I had not been as steady in my thinking as I would have liked,” he wrote... So he took up a chance to write speeches for Sargent Shriver as the politician stumped for Democrats across the U.S. in 1970... Yet he believed the party was neglecting a large part of its base, including Irish, Italian and Slavic Catholic immigrants.Such voters, he wrote, “did not want their kids taking acid. They did not want their daughters sleeping around, or having abortions.”.. His 1972 book “The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics” described people who would become Reagan Democrats, as Mr. Novak himself became.
.. socialism was “the residue of Judeo-Christian faith, without religion. It is a belief in the goodness of the human race and paradise on earth.” Capitalism, he added, was “a system built on belief in human selfishness; given checks and balances, it is nearly always a smashing, scandalous success.”
.. In his book “The Joy of Sports,” he dismissed the idea that sports were a waste of an intellectual’s time. “The basic reality of all human life is play, games, sport; these are the realities from which the basic metaphors for all that is important in the rest of life are drawn,” he wrote.