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Sergey Bubka: the recordman
Perhaps no other athlete in the history of world sport has set so many world records - thirty-five - as the Soviet pole-vaulter Sergey Bubka.  Nevertheless, sometimes the performance of an athlete and the world records are not necessarily accompanied by many distinctions in the Olympic Games. This is the case of the Ukrainian champion, who became first Olympic winner only once, in the South Korea Olympics, in 1988.
Bubka was born in Voroshilovgrad, today Luhansk, in the Ukraine in December 1963 and was engaged in sport at a very early age. Already by the age of nine he was specializing in the pole vault. His rare talent in that particular contest drew the attention of the officials of Soviet sport. As a result, by the age of ten, Bubka was training under the supervision of important trainers and gymnasts. His first trainer was the renowned Vitaly Petrov. When Petrov moved to Donetsk, in the Ukraine, in order to supervise the preparation of the local group of Soviet athletes, 15-year-old Bubka followed him.
Bubka achieved his first important distinction in the athletics world championship in Helsinki in 1983, where he became world champion. Almost two years later, in July 1985, he managed to overcome the barrier of six metres in the pole vault in games that were held in Paris. It is characteristic that between 1984 and 1988, the Soviet champion improved the world record by 21 centimetres, something which ranked him among the best track-and-field athletes of all times.
The abstinence of the Soviet Union from the 1984 Olympics deprived Bubka of a certain, according to many people, gold medal. He won his only gold Olympic medal four years later, in the Seoul Olympics. It only took him one valid jump at 5.90 in order to gain that first Olympic distinction. Apart from his Olympic victory, the "recordman", as journalists started to call him, became six times world champion and once European champion.
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