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All things looking up for FSU athlete

Lacy Janson's pole-vaulting career soars toward the pinnacle of her sport.

By BRIAN LANDMAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 28, 2002

As Florida State freshman Lacy Janson adjusted and tightened her grip on the fiberglass pole, she stared at the thin bar hanging at a most tantalizing height.

In Atlantic Coast Conference action, no woman had pole vaulted 14 feet. Janson never had surpassed 13 feet, 7 inches in a meet. Yet she knew this try at the league championships could be different.

"I'm going to do it," she told herself that April day.

Her coach, FSU assistant Dennis Nobles, believed it, too. Not only had he seen her break that mark in training sessions, but he marveled as she hit her takeoff "nicely" this time and launched her 5-foot-10, 140-pound frame skyward.

"I'm going over. I'm going over,' " Janson thought.

But as she descended, she brushed the bar with her stomach and, then supine on the mat far below, helplessly watched it wiggle.

"Don't fall down," she pleaded. "Don't fall down."

"Stay," Nobles ordered.

It did and Janson, who only took up the sport as a junior at Sarasota Cardinal Mooney, made history. Her ACC-winning vault bettered the previous conference best by 23/4 inches.

Janson already had become the first FSU woman to qualify for the NCAA outdoor championships in the relatively young event. Her 14-foot vault would have won last year's NCAA title handily and is tied for the nation's fourth highest this year, less than 3 inches behind UCLA senior Tracy O'Hara's best.

"That's a big step for her and only having three years under her belt, that's pretty awesome," said Stacy Dragila, who won the first Olympic gold medal at the 2000 Games in Sydney with a vault of 15-1.

Dragila, a pioneer in the sport, said she didn't reach such heights until her fourth year as a vaulter.

"And the 14-foot jump at the ACC was her worst of the day," Nobles said. "Lacy had jumps leading up to it that were just jaw dropping."

Women's pole vaulting can trace its history to the early 1900s, but the sport needed nearly a century to gain a credible foothold in track and field.

USA Track and Field held its first outdoor championships in 1997. The NCAA began sponsoring the event a year later, 77 years after men's pole vaulting became part of the Division I championships. The International Amateur Athletic Federation's first outdoor championships came in 1999.

Not that Janson, 19, noticed or much cared.

She loved volleyball and, as a high school junior, discovered pole vaulting only by happenstance. After a volleyball camp at FSU showed her the need for year-round conditioning, she decided to go out for track and field.

"I figured that would keep me moving and running," she said. "The coaches had me doing everything but pole vault."

Until John Raleigh suggested otherwise. Raleigh, a pole vaulter in high school and college, needed people and in Lacy he saw an athlete who possessed the speed, the coordination and the apparent fearlessness to do well.

With Raleigh holding the pole out, she ran as fast as she could and grabbed a hold of it as he flung her into the mat-cushioned pit. She loved the ride. "I've got to keep doing this," she told herself as she bounced up to go again.

The individuality of pole vaulting returned her to her days as a gymnast, which she did for 11 years before she grew too tall to continue.

"What you see is the girls who have improved so much so fast are the gymnasts," Dragila said. "They have the great body awareness already ingrained in them."

As a senior last year, Janson won the high school national championship, then traveled from North Carolina to Virginia later the same day to compete in the junior nationals. She finished second to Arizona's Amy Linnen, now a sophomore who also cleared 14 feet this year.

"What she did was amazing," Raleigh said. "I don't think there's any high school girl to compete in two national meets the same day."

Pole vaulting requires a unique mental toughness, especially these days.

Clewiston High sophomore Jesus Quesada died after bouncing off the padding and hitting his head Feb. 18. Five days later at the Big Ten indoor championships, Penn State sophomore Kevin Dare died after falling backward onto the metal box.

A year earlier, the American Journal of Sports Medicine published findings that pole vaulting had the highest mortality rate per participant of any sport. It found 16 reported deaths and about 25,000 athletes between 1982 and 1998.

"Any time you expose your head and neck upside down like that, much like gymnastics, there is an inherent danger there," said Dragila, perhaps the nation's most visible advocate for improved safety precautions as well as improved coaching.

Dare's death, in particular, struck home with Janson. She knew him after both traveled to England and Scotland for a junior national meet last year.

"It was really hard to deal with, especially since it hit so close," Janson said. "I'd never known anybody who died before. It was awful. I had a little trouble going back to vaulting, just thinking about everything that could happen. But if you're going to do this, you have to put it aside. You can't let it affect you and stop you from doing something you absolutely love. I know Kevin wouldn't want that to happen because he loved it."

After the NCAA meet, she heads to the junior nationals at Stanford. If she finishes first or second, she will represent the United States in the world junior championships in the summer in Jamaica. But her coaches believe a trip to the 2004 Olympics in Greece isn't too lofty a goal.

"I can definitely see her challenging for a berth," Nobles said. "Hopefully it won't go to her head, but Lacy's pretty darn special. She's really at a point where there's no telling how good she can be."

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