SERGEI BUBKA : KEY TO THE VAULT

At the inaugural track-and-field meet for Atlanta's Olympic stadium in May, two officials watch a Ukrainian pole vaulter prepare for his first jump. The vaulter has been rooted in hypnotic concentration for almost two minutes when, without warning, he explodes down the runway. His legs blur into the scorching stride of a 100-m sprinter, but his upper body is like no sprinter's on earth. It looks more like a bag of rocks lashed together with steel cable. He hauls all this bulk to the end of the runway, then plants 17 ft. of fiber glass into the ground and proceeds to rocket, upside-down, toward the bar hanging nearly 20 ft. above his head. He has barely cleared the bar when one official turns to the other with an unusual confession. "Damn," he exclaims. "Check out Bubka. Wish that guy'd agree to be my wife's sperm donor."

Um, gosh. This is surely a flattering tribute. But it's hardly the sort of notion one expects to hear Men Who Follow Sports expressing to each other, even in the New Age '90s. Come to think of it, this is hardly the sort of notion one expects to hear any man, in any age, expressing even to himself. But when Sergei Bubka thunders down the runway with the zeal of a mounted hussar about to drive his lance through a peasant yeoman, people are apt to do strange things. Things one wouldn't expect them to do. Things one might call downright ... unnatural. Like the three frat brothers who wrench their gaze away from the bikini-clad strumpets draped over the first-deck seats to train their binoculars on the vault pit. Or the women heading for the video monitor, who have just abandoned places in the rest-room line they have been holding for 30 minutes. Or the enterprising youngsters pelting spectators with hot-dog parts, who have suddenly adopted an air of near religious quiescence. Indeed, the entire stadium seems frozen in the sort of electrified, meditative reverence generally reserved for events of celestial magnitude.

Which, let's face it, is a pretty fair description of Sergei Bubka. This, after all, is a man so good at what he does that he often starts vaulting at heights that have already defeated most of his rivals; a man who has jumped higher than any other human being (20 ft. 13/4 in.); a man who has dominated his field more ruthlessly and carved more world records for himself (35--18 indoors, 17 outdoors) than any other sportsman in history. But Bubka is more than simply the world's premier vaulter. He is an athlete who has so transcended his event that his most formidable competitors (some insist his only competitors) are himself and whatever law of physics ordains that a human being has no business leaping the height of a two-story town house.

Bubka, 32, has been tilting at limitations for years, ever since he began vaulting at age 10 in the Ukrainian coal town of Lugansk, against the wishes of his father, a Soviet army sergeant. "It was a very hard time," he recalls. For nine years he persevered, unheralded, until the 1983 World championships in Helsinki. There he cleared 18 ft. 81/4 in. on his first try, a jump that won the gold and presaged dazzling things to come. So green was Bubka at the time that he failed to show up at the required press conference afterward; he had already taken the bus back to the athletes' village.