"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.
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
| Topic | Sports |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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