Kiwi Olympian: Glenn Howard

By PETER CALDER

His legs, smooth-shaven and coltishly thin, seem to go on for ever. Stretching through his warmup, he forms an improbable G, supporting himself on his neck and thrusting the long limbs in the air where they cycle in huge arcs.

Or they pump, the knees almost at chin height as he moves up and down the track in an exaggerated imitation of a child's pavement skip.

They pump, those legs, the same way, though not to the same extreme, as he drives through the 25m curving swoop of his approach.

His yellow-soled, thick-spiked shoes unerringly find the two marks of strapping tape on the rubberised surface marking the waypoints on his runup.

What happens next is almost too fast to absorb. He's been running so quickly, his momentum has seemed entirely forward. But on the seventh step his 85kg, 194cm frame does something which seems to defy the laws both of physics and physique.

The right foot plants, the leg thrusts, the muscles so clearly delineated they look like an anatomy chart. The sudden pressure turns that 85kg into a tonne and a quarter, all relying on the slender, strapped ankle.

He pivots, twists, springs, soars, arches. The head leads, up and over. The shoulders, torso, pelvis, thighs, calves, feet follow in the arc.

An instant later he is on his back on the thick foam pads. The shirt hem drops for a moment, offering a glimpse of two circular scars on the spine. Between that 10th pace and where his upended body is rolling back to upright, a vertical bar trembles slightly on its supports then stills. It is 2m off the ground.

Two metres does not sound like a lot when you are walking it. But above the ground it is high enough to make the air seem thin. It is the height of an interior door frame, of a useful basketballer, of a lock forward in a rugby lineout. And Glenn Howard goes over it, backward and blurred, looking like he is flying.

Not at every attempt. On several occasions on a grey, windy July afternoon as he practises in the West Auckland indoor stadium, the bar dropsonto the feet of the steel uprights with a hollow clunk.

But Howard and coach Anne Stephens seem scarcely to notice. Their focus, like those of all competitors during training, is on technique. The perfection of that approach is all. The flying comes later.

Because Howard knows he can fly. He did it one magic March day at the national athletics championships in Christchurch when he entered the competition at 2.10m. He sealed the title when he cleared 2.14m, 2.18m and 2.22m, each effortlessly, each at the first attempt.

Then he called for 2.26m, 1cm above his own national record. Cleared, first attempt. Then 2.28m, the Olympic qualifying height. Cleared, first attempt. Then, incredibly, he ordered the bar up to 2.3m, 36cm above his own head, setting a target that would rank him 14th in the world. Cleared, first attempt.

Smashing his own New Zealand record and trouncing his rivals, Howard raised the tantalising prospect of a medal at Sydney .

The 24-year-old from the North Harbour Bays Cougars Club on Auckland's North Shore says he could have jumped higher that day if he had started higher and not tired himself with the first jumps. Christchurch is his home town - he joined the Papanui Toc H aged 4 - and the city's QEII stadium his favourite venue.

"I had been building up to it for a while with some good jumps over the summer," he says. "And I had it in the back of my mind that I could not wait to jump in Christchurch. I did not think I could jump 2.30. I did not think I was in that kind of shape.

"But I woke up on the Sunday and it was meant to be windy and wet and it was a beautiful day and 26 or 27 degrees. I just knew it was going to happen."

In the runup to the Olympics, Howard cleared 2.20m and came close to the second fitness performance target of 2.25m. He made the team anyway on the strength of those summer jumps and he can start his runup knowing it can happen again.

"Knowing" that it is going to happen is about half of the high jumper's art. Anne Stephens will tell you that you can get away in high jumping with a 90 per cent perfect technique. But when it comes to what she calls "mental imagery and self-belief," 100 per cent is a sort of low minimum.

"It is a little bit out there," she says mildly, "to believe you can jump 35 or 40cm above your head.

"There are two events at the Olympics where you never win; you keep going until you lose and the bar falls off. If you prepare well, you have confidence and that is my job."

Stephens was coaching Australian Jagan Hames when he took the world junior title in 1994 but she is not fond of using the words "Glenn Howard" and "Olympic medal" in the same sentence.

"I do not want to put too much pressure on him. This is his first Olympics and he is currently 13th in the world. If he makes the final I will be really pleased."

It is worth saying, though, that Howard is a mere hand's width from being a serious medal prospect. He is some distance from the world record of 2.45m, a few centimetres above the ceiling. That is how high Cuban Javier Sotomayor flew in Spain in July 1993, four years after jumping 2.44m, and he is still the only one to have broken the magic "8ft" barrier.

Sotomayor's late admission - until early this month he was out of contention after testing positive for cocaine - has inevitably dented our man's chances.

He's not exactly cocky, either. At 24, he is a youngster in high-jumping terms. The optima of technique and strength intersect somewhere between 28 and 30 in his sport. Still, he has his sights set on gold at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester and high hopes of an Olympic medal at Athens in 2004.

Achieving any of the above would be something of a medical miracle. What makes Howard's airborne feats more than ordinarily remarkable is that his back is held together with two titanium screws and a surgical steel cable.

He had hoped the sharp pain he felt at the world championships in Athens in 1994 was "just a back strain" - and kept on training.

But x-rays and CT scans revealed two stress fractures, one of a vertebra and another of a vertebral process, the thin, bony wing protruding from one of the backbone's building blocks.

After complicated surgery to screw and wire him back together, he took a year off jumping which, he says, refreshed him mentally and physically.

The pain has not gone. If he sits or stands for more than a few minutes without changing position, the pain starts up. But it never hurts to jump.

Two days before competition, Glenn Howard begins his preparation in the shower, soaping his legs and shaving them smooth, It is all part of gearing his body up for the extreme challenge of defying gravity. It starts getting him focused, he says, a process in which doing the little things right is a big deal.

Baby-smooth as he is, Howard will be one of the babies of the team for Sydney and even an appearance in the final will be a cause for pride.

But, as Anne Stephens says, there is plenty of jumping in him yet.

Herald Online Olympic News