Athletics · 1985 · Paris, France
The First Man Over Six Metres
A 21-year-old Soviet pole vaulter clears a height the event's own experts considered years away, opening an era of dominance in which he broke the world record more than 30 times.
6.00m
Height cleared
13 July 1985
Date
35
Career world records
By the summer of 1985, Sergey Bubka already held the outdoor world record at 5.94 metres and was the reigning world champion, but six metres was treated as a symbolic frontier further off than his current form suggested. Bubka had other ideas, and had been targeting the height deliberately.
On 13 July 1985 at the Stade Charléty in Paris, competing in a meet built around the attempt, Bubka cleared 6.00 metres, brushing the bar on the way over but staying on the right side of it. It was the first time in history anyone had vaulted that high, a landmark comparable to the four-minute mile in the way it reset the sport's sense of its own limits.
Bubka would go on to break the world record officially 35 times across his career, indoors and outdoors, eventually pushing the outdoor mark to 6.14 metres in 1994, a record that stood for 26 years. His dominance was such that for the better part of a decade, the only person capable of beating Sergey Bubka's world record was Sergey Bubka.
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