Sergey Bubka, the pole-vaulter, was born in Voroshilivgrod, in the Ukraine (Ex-Soviet Union) on the 4th December 1963.

The winner of the gold medal at the Seoul Olympics, with a vault of 5.90 metres, Bubka, who cleared 2.70 metres at the age of eleven, has achieved everything in his athletics event.

He was junior and overall European Champion in Stuttgart in 1988: open-air world champion in Helsinki (1983), Rome (1987) and Seville (March 1991) and indoor champion in Indianapolis (1987).

He has broken the world record, both indoor and outdoor, and, so far, no other athlete has managed to surpass him. His current open-air record, since he jumped 5.85 in 1984 in Bratislava, is 6.08 metres, which he set in Moscow in June 1991; this is one centimetre more than the height reached in Shiznoka (Japan) in May of the same year and two centimetres more than in Nice in 1988.

As far as his indoor records are concerned, Bubka has raised the bar by 30 centimetres since he set his first record of 5.81 in Vilnius in 1984. He has recently set a record of 6.11 in Donetz in March 1991, although his aim is to reach a height of 6.25 m.

His biographers relate that when he was ten, Sergei Bubka won a bet with his friends to see who could stay longest with his head in a barrel of water, and that he spent several hours hanging from the branch of the tallest tree in his home town of Voloshilovgrad, so as not to fall.

The anecdotes reveal two of the virtues which have made Bubka the indisputable monarch of pole-vaulting: his almost reckless daring and the unusual strength of his arms, which would allow him, 18 years later, to bend a pole with a stiffness of 225 pounds and to launch his body weight of 80 kilos to 6.10 metres.

Unlike other implements used in athletics (discus, javelin, hammer, weights), there are no limits on the pole. Bubka may use any tool, of whatever length and diameter, to lift himself up. He may even select the materials his tools are made from. All that the international Athletics Federation regulations require is that the surface be smooth. Bubka works with a "UCS Sprint" pole, a model manufactured in the United States exclusively for the Ukrainian. For any athlete other than Bubka, vaulting with such a pole would be a major risk, as the Soviet sportsman himself remarked in the Anoeta stadium in San Sebastián, as it takes powerful arms like his to bend it. These poles are more rigid than normal, so that great power and strength are needed to bend them. Bubka now uses 5.11 metre-long poles, but he has even jumped with 5.29 metre poles, the longest ever used by any vaulter.

His physical abilities allow him to run 100 metres in 10.45 seconds and to jump almost 8 metres. In 1980, Bubka was already an all-round athlete: he was declared junior champion of the USSR in combined events and, shortly afterwards, a vault of 5.10 metres led him definitively into the event of pole-vault. His technique consists of taking 22 strides as if he were a sprinter and then an impeccable vault and twist over the bar.

In 1990 Sergei Bubka was signed by Berlin´s " Olypischer Sportsclub" athletics club. Bubka is a member of the International Olympic Committee.