By Sam Baker
The pole vault is the mastery of human mechanics as applied to the laws of physics, and the women who defy these laws are artists of athletics. From the angle of the onlooker, the sky becomes the background for heavenly bodies falling from heights of human-powered flights. Speed, power, angle, and form are a few of the controllable factors that momentarily loosen gravity’s grasp, but nature sometimes throws in crosswinds, rain, and cold to keep jumpers from feeling what it’s like to fly.
“I run really fast with a long pole, plant it, and jump as high as possible over another pole without knocking it down,” is how Melissa Gergel would describe what she does to someone who has never heard of pole vault. Sounds simple, but a wise woman once said,
If it were easy, then everyone would do it.
Melissa speaks to the press with a captivating smile and unparalleled positive energy, even just minutes after she was out-jumped for a chance at the Olympics. “I can’t say that I’m not disappointed, but I’m young and am going to keep training. I will only quit when I stop having fun,” she tells one reporter who asked what it was like to come up short. Jennifer Suhr, Becky Holliday, and Lacy Janson will represent the US in London, and during the press conference they each spoke of how long the road was to reach the Olympics. Holliday last competed as a Duck in 2003, and now nine years later she has caught a dream she has chased since age five.
Melissa Gergel is what role models are made of, and although nothing about what she has accomplished in her life is easy, her grace under pressure disguises her grit. Approaching education with the same competitive spirit that has made her NCAA Champion, PAC-10 Champion, 7-time All American, and Illinois State Champion in high school, she completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Oregon in only three years. That wasn’t enough for the champ. She received a graduate degree in Human Physiology just one week before the Olympic Trials, and she is only 23. Her passion for life inadvertently becomes a catalyst for inspiring others to push past their previously perceived limits of possibility.
If nature truly intended to keep us from feeling what it’s like to fly, then she would have never allowed for the women of Oregon to grow wings. Time is the final factor in determining one’s freedom of flight, and time holds the keys to all realms of evolution. Melissa’s journey is far from complete, and “We Grew Wings” is proud to have flown upon a portion of her path.
