Patience pays off for Tim Mack

When Tim Mack cleared 6.01 at the World Athletics Final in Monaco he became the 12th athlete of all-time to enter the elite “6-metre club”. Ed Gordon portrays the 32-year-old American who had dramatically grabbed the Olympic title just a few weeks earlier.

“Good things come to those who wait.”

So said Harrison Dillard immediately after crossing the finish line in his belated hurdles win at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki.

Now, more than fifty years later, a similar declaration comes from another native of Cleveland, that sometimes mockingly maligned American industrial city on the shores of Lake Erie. 

“Yes, this was the end of an ‘eight-year plan’,” said Tim Mack, in describing his most unexpected ascent to the pinnacle of the pole-vaulting world after his Athens victory at an Olympic-record height of 5.95. “What I was doing seven and eight years ago is helping me today.”

Besides replicating Dillard’s triumph, Mack’s win also extended Cleveland’s contribution to Olympic history stretching back to the days of Jesse Owens and Stella Walsh in the 1930s. 

“Unexpected” perhaps is an inaccurate adjective to describe the American’s achievement, at least in Mack’s own mind, for he had harboured thoughts of this exploit ever since his ignominious eighth-place finish at the 2000 US Olympic Trials.

“As long as four years ago, I was talking to my sports psychologist about taking a victory lap in Athens,” Mack said as he recalled thrashing out thoughts with his mind guru, Joe Whitney.

Mack even chose the name “goldnathens” for his e-mail address to provide himself - and others in his cyberworld - a constant reminder of where his long-term focus was.

“People thought I was crazy [at the time],” he continued, adding that “just talking about it today gets me pumped up.”

At the relatively advanced age of 32, reached only days after his Athens win, Mack is just now settling into his niche within the top echelon of the pole vaulting world. But the label of “late bloomer” has seemingly been part of his resumé for most of his sporting life.

“I only jumped 4.10 in high school,” he admitted in thinking back to his days at St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland, “so it was obvious I wouldn’t be going anywhere with those marks.”

With such an undistinguished record, Mack had few university choices available, and he enrolled at tiny Malone College in nearby Canton. The city is singularly known as the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame and is not regarded as the home base of any budding Olympic athletes.

Still, Mack put on a good face and continued to develop, emerging as a 5.30 jumper after three seasons. But he still was searching for an emotional and psychological catalyst to bring him even higher. In short, he yearned for the ‘big leagues’.

In 1994, his quest led to the University of Tennessee and to coach Jim Bemiller, the Knoxville lawyer and former collegiate vaulter who has been guiding his progress the past twelve years. It also brought Mack together with a potent training partner, future World Indoor champion Lawrence Johnson, two years his junior but already a 5.52 vaulter.

“Those two are opposites athletically,” Bemiller said in drawing comparisons between his two leading protégés. “Lawrence came out of high school biting off big chunks at a time. But Tim was more methodical about the whole thing, getting better all the time but in smaller stages.”

Meticulous and analytical are descriptive terms which best sum up Mack’s approach to training and competition. And his seriousness of purpose is typified by the signature visor, a surrogate isolation chamber he erects at competitions to totally shut out distractions.

Over the last three years, Mack has viewed his craft much as a scientist would regard a research project, with copious note-taking on the many variables he encounters in each training session. He and his competition/workout diary have become an inseparable pair, as this now dog-eared permanent record of his jumps and meet strategies is consulted dozens of times during training or competition.

“It’s something we’ve always suggested to our jumpers, to keep a training log,” said Bemiller. “Some embrace it more than others, and this year it really came into its own because Tim was moving to bigger poles.”

A catalog of the specific poles in his arsenal, plus his various height grips, is all there for immediate reference, as well as for planning his future competitions.

And considering the way Mack plans in micro-steps, the future, per se, can lay months - and many heights - ahead. In early summer at the Prefontaine Classic in June, he set his sights on six metres as his performance goal for the year. At the time, his outdoor best was 5.84 dating back to a competition two years earlier in 2002, and his current season best stood at 5.70. 

Mack’s resulting ninth-place finish that weekend - a lackluster 5.50 performance at the most prestigious meeting on American soil - would not ordinarily be viewed as a spawning ground for lofty goals.

“Both Jim and I were really frustrated at that point,” Mack admits. “In fact, we had a serious discussion while waiting at the airport in Eugene as we travelled home,” he added, suggesting a euphemistic use of the term “discussion”.

By coincidence, the Oregon city was also the drop-off point for a new pole custom-made for Mack by Steve Chappell, UCS Spirit’s long-time “guardian angel” of vaulters going back to the early days of Sergey Bubka and before. As Chappell later said, this pole was to be an integral part of Mack’s mission to jump six metres.

At the time, it seemed only like excess baggage, but Mack would soon regard his “big stick” as something akin to a talisman as the season wore on. 

Now, armed with the proper equipment, he threw himself into the heavy part of his season, with his short-term objectives at the US Trials and the Olympic Games designed to be a springboard for his performance goal.

Within ten days, he twice increased his two-year-old PB with leaps of 5.85 and 5.90, before re-validating his career best with a victory at the US Trials at the latter height. Most vaulters would have been ecstatic with a win and would have gone into immediate adrenalin free-fall. But Mack kept going, sampling the six-metre realm for the first time in his career with three respectable but unsuccessful tries at 6.04.

The only blotches during his late-summer schedule came immediately after the Trials in his first European appearances. A no-height in Paris resulted after his poles failed to arrive with him after the transatlantic flight, and four days later he finished third in the uninspiring drizzly air of Stockholm.

It was Mack’s final pre-Olympic competition in Zürich which convinced him - and many others in attendance - that the Olympic title was reachable.

“I treated Zürich as if it were the Olympic final,” he said in explaining his psychological preparation for Athens. “I knew these same people were going to be there [in Athens], and I wanted to use it as my final tuneup because I wasn’t going to be jumping for more than two weeks.”

A third-attempt 5.85 gave him the win in a stadium he regarded as difficult “because of the strange sight perspectives”. Instead of savouring the victory, however, the ever-analytical Mack kept jumping, just as he had done at the US Trials, to absorb more of what he could expect from several of his bigger poles at a near-six-metre height.

What happened next in Athens is now well-known. Despite having had the image of that victory lap in the Olympic Stadium ever-present in his mind for four years, a new goal of reaching pole-vaulting’s ultimate benchmark of respect was now haunting him.

After winning the Olympic title in dramatic fashion over teammate Toby Stevenson with a personal-best 5.95 on his final attempt, Mack strode to the tribune to confer with his coach.

“I don’t want to shake anyone’s hand, and I don’t want any hugs. I want to make this next bar,” Bemiller recalls Mack’s emphatic declaration. A simple victory was not enough for him on this evening. The gold medal had suddenly turned six metres into an obsession.

“I took my last jump [at 6.00] and then I mentally started to celebrate,” he recalled. “I ran over to my coach, to my parents, to my ‘windcatcher’ [personal friend Tim O’Hare, who made a last-minute journey to Athens], and then I set out with Toby to jog around the stadium.”

Mack’s euphoria was suddenly squelched later in the evening, however, when he discovered that his two biggest poles had not been packed into his bag before the equipment was sent out of the stadium. Although one of them was later found, his newest pole - that “integral component” - was never recovered. 

“Someone in Athens has a nice souvenir,” he later said of the incident. “But really, the pole hadn’t done much for me up until that time - only four jumps taken on it and all of them misses,” he added with a laugh.

With characteristic sang-froid, Mack immediately contacted Chappell, and within two weeks, his inventory was again complete.

“I was ready after the Games,” he declared. “I knew I was going to four competitions after that, and I was physically and mentally prepared to jump six metres. It was just a matter of deciding I was going to do it and not letting myself relax.”

Escaping the bad winds of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium with a countback win over Derek Miles at 5.80 - before oversleeping the next morning and accidentally leaving behind his Olympic gold medal in the hotel safe - Mack arrived in Monaco for the World Athletics Final.

Finally - and for the only time in the season, he later confirmed - he found jumping conditions that were undeniably superb. 

After securing victory at 5.86, Mack again found himself standing alone while battling a six-metre bar. This time, however, a third-attempt success at 6.01 brought him into vaulting’s exclusive club as the twelfth member.

“There were so many little things giving me energy there, just as in Athens,” he recounted. Not content to end the competition with a clearance, Mack took one jump at a would-be American record 6.06 before closing with two attempts at a World-record 6.16, a height not even Bubka had attempted outdoors. 

It was all in a day’s work for Mack, who seizes every opportunity with an iron grasp. “I go into every competition like my back’s against a wall,” he said. “I don’t take any competition lightly. Look at those last competitions after the Olympics. I could have just taken it easy.”

Although Mack will be most remembered in the future for his Olympic victory, close followers of the event will undoubtedly give him a special place of honour in recognition of his season-ending Bubka-esque bravura with seven consecutive wins, four of them coming after the Games. His notebook contains no pages dealing with an emotional letdown. Instead, his competition philosophy is to be always working toward a goal.

Success was a long time coming for Tim Mack, and one is tempted to ask what kept him resolute and doggedly determined to stay the course as he moves well into his fourth decade of life.

“I guess it was my belief in the back of my mind that the plan was going to work,” he said, pausing to think about all of the bumps along the way. “It wasn’t the easiest path one could take, and I would not wish it upon just anybody . . . but it worked.”

Good things come to those who wait.

Published in IAAF Magazine Issue 4 - 2004