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 had filed under 'years away', then spends a decade beating his own world record.
6.00m
Height cleared
13 July 1985
Date
35
Career world records
By the summer of 1985 Sergey Bubka held the outdoor world record at 5.94 metres and was the reigning world champion, and six metres was still spoken of as a symbolic frontier further off than his form suggested. He had been aiming at it deliberately for some time.
On 13 July 1985 at the Stade Charléty in Paris, at a meet built around the attempt, Bubka cleared 6.00 metres, brushing the bar on the way over and leaving it sitting there. Nobody had vaulted that high before. The sport reset its sense of its own limits the way running had after the four-minute mile.
He broke the world record officially 35 times across his career, indoors and outdoors, and pushed the outdoor mark to 6.14 metres in 1994, where it stayed for 26 years. For the better part of a decade, the only person in a position to beat Sergey Bubka's world record was Sergey Bubka.
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