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Motivation Quote by Sergei Bubka

"What is nice about this sport is that I am responsible for most everything"

About this Quote

There is a quiet flex tucked inside Bubka's plainspoken line: in a sport built on solitary risk, accountability becomes a luxury. Pole vaulting isn’t like football or hockey, where you can hide in the system, blame a bad pass, or disappear into the noise of the game. It’s you, a runway, a pole, and gravity. When Bubka says he’s “responsible for most everything,” he’s praising a kind of clean causality that team sports rarely offer: if you clear the bar, you earned it; if you miss, you own it.

The intent reads less like self-help stoicism and more like a competitor savoring control. “Nice” is doing heavy lifting here. It signals that the pressure isn’t merely tolerated, it’s preferred. The subtext is a worldview: mastery is measured by what can’t be outsourced. In an event where margins are microscopic - a fraction of a stride, a slightly late plant, a wobble at takeoff - the athlete’s relationship to responsibility is intimate and obsessive. You don’t just train; you debug yourself.

Context matters: Bubka wasn’t a good vaulter; he was the benchmark, a serial record-breaker who treated performance like engineering. Coming out of the Soviet sports machine, he also knew what it meant to be a product of institutions. This sentence nudges back against that, framing greatness as personal authorship. It’s a proud, bracing credo: the freedom of having no excuses.

Quote Details

TopicSports
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Bubka, Sergei. (2026, January 17). What is nice about this sport is that I am responsible for most everything. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/what-is-nice-about-this-sport-is-that-i-am-73740/

Chicago Style
Bubka, Sergei. "What is nice about this sport is that I am responsible for most everything." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/what-is-nice-about-this-sport-is-that-i-am-73740/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"What is nice about this sport is that I am responsible for most everything." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/what-is-nice-about-this-sport-is-that-i-am-73740/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Sergei Bubka

Sergei Bubka (born February 4, 1963) is a Athlete from Ukraine.

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