Jumping High While Bombs Are Dropping
When I was a kid, we didn’t have iPhones or video games. I was talking to my old buddy Gin Bottle Garvey, and he was saying the same thing. First thing in the morning, our mothers would kick us out of the house and say, “See ya at supper time.” So we’d use our imaginations and make up stuff to do. Some of it was good clean fun, and some of it was mischief. Yeah, most of it.
When the Summer Olympics were happening, we’d have our own Olympics down at the reservoir, or the “rez,” as we called it. I was pretty good at the high jump. The pole you jumped over was bamboo and came inside a new rug my mother had delivered to the house.
I was a big fan of the American high jumpers. Especially John Thomas, who went to Boston University, and Dick Fosbury, who developed the “Fosbury Flop” and won a gold medal in Mexico using that technique. The other guy was Dwight Stones.
Anyways, I ran into a story the other day about a female Ukrainian high jumper, Yaroslava Mahuchikh. She won Olympic gold and five European titles by the time she was 22. In 2024, she broke the world record in the high jump, a record that had stood for 37 years, since 1987. The day after her world-record jump, Russia hit Ukraine with deadly missile attacks, and her joy quickly faded.
She won the European title again last week and will be going for gold again at the next Summer Games in LA in ’28.
“No record will bring joy while Russia attacks my country every day, killing our soldiers and taking the lives of children and their parents,” she said. “For me, it’s really important to show the whole world that we are Ukrainians, that we are strong and we continue fighting for independence, for liberty.”
I’m rooting for her in LA, so the flag of Ukraine will fly from the podium as they play the Ukrainian national anthem. Keep your dukes up.
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