Roger Ruth of Victoria, Canada, was the pioneer masters vaulter — setting world age-group records in his 40s back in the early 1970s. He went 4.60 (15-1) at age 44 in an era when the world open record was about 18-2. He’s now 80, and retired from jumping. But he’s still a force to be reckoned with — as one of the world’s best vault statisticians and historians. In recent years, he’s maintained extensive women’s record lists by country. And yesterday he announced a major new project: Checking for masters (35 and over) on existing open track lists. This is long overdue. Roger may reveal buried treasure — and marks that deserve WR recognition by World Masters Athletics.

Under the heading “Masters Athletes on World Lists,” here’s what Roger posted on the T-and-F Mailing List:

This project began, simply enough, with Derek Miles’ 5.85 vault at the Brandenburg Gate competition, just one centimeter short of Jeff Hartwig’s world masters (age 35-39) record, which led me to wonder how many other masters-age vaulters there were of world-competition quality in this outdoor season. Mirko Jalava’s site seemed the best source for this information, since his World Deep Lists are far deeper and more informative than any others I’ve found.
As it turned out, there were 15 vaulters age 35 or greater on the day of their seasonal bests. I was also able to find the age of the oldest masters vaulter on the list (43), and because it was relatively easy to do, the age of the youngest vaulter to make the list (15).
That, of course, raised questions for me about the number of women vaulters of masters age who qualified for the deep list, so I had to check out the comparison there. Then, a next question was how well masters did in sheer-speed events, so the process of checking ages on Mirko’s lists was repeated for the 100 meters — beginning with the
women, to ask whether Merlene Ottey was the oldest on the list, then turning to the men, to find the oldest there.
In short, there is no “short.” One question follows another and I’ve so far done the masters-competitor summaries for men and women in one of each major event categories; jumps, sprints, middle distance, distance, weights, and hurdles. I think you’ll find something of interest in each, and having Mirko’s permission to post these and
others, I’ll continue to work on this for awhile. It takes me about one day’s computer time for each event, so I’ll send them at about that rate for as long as I can stay with it.
A note about procedures: From Mirko’s full list of a given event, I used the “find” function to search for athletes with a given birth year, beginning with 1973, 1972, etc., and copy-pasted those to a Word document.
For those born in l973 only, I checked their birth date against the date of the meet when they accomplished their seasonal best to assure that they were “masters” on the date that qualified for the list, discarding the names of those who have not yet reached 35.
(There is some chance of error in this, since the athlete might have reached a qualifying mark, although less than the seasonal best, after his birthday.) Mirko has another set of “performance” lists that might correct this error, but it would have taken quite a lot more time to check these additional data. Perhaps some reader might like to undertake this and correct any errors in my summaries.
I then sorted the masters list by world rankings. For each athlete, I’ve included world ranking, performance, name, country, birth date, place meet was held, and date. Mirko’s lists also usually include name of the meet and placing. You’ll note that I’ve bold-faced the line of information about the oldest athlete on the list for each event.
For starters, here are those lists of masters vaulters:
Masters on Men’s Pole Vault World List
N=853
List threshold=4.80m
4 5.85 Derek Miles USA 28 Sep 72 Berlin 7 Sep
13 5.75 Tim Lobinger GER 3 Sep 72 Nürnberg 5 Jul
18 5.71 Tim Mack USA 15 Sep 72 Van Nuys CA 1 Jun
29 5.70 Jeff Hartwig USA 25 Sep 67 Eugene OR 29 Jun
154 5.32 Laurens Looije NED 12 Jan 73 Amsterdam 6 Jul
279 5.20 Ilian Efremov BUL 2 Aug 70 Sofia 14 Jun
281 5.20 Nick Buckfield GBR 5 Jun 73 Leiden 14 Jun
334 5.10 Andrei Fedotov MDA 9 Nov 68 Chisinau 31 May
440 5.05 Grigoriy Yegorov KAZ 12 Jan 67 Castellón 21 Jun
499 5.00 Maurilio Mariani ITA 22 Apr 73 Firenze 27 Jun
527 4.95A Riaan Botha RSA 8 Nov 70 Pretoria 2 Feb
581 4.90 Valdemir Silva BRA 18 Mar 71 São Paulo 26 Mar
617 4.90 Giacomo Befani ITA 8 Jan 70 Terni 1 May
657 4.90 François Thénault FRA 4 May 72 Ottawa 22 Jun
823 4.80 Francisco Hernández ESP 15 Dec 64 Pamplona
28 Jun
Youngest athlete (15) on this list:
798 4.80 Jin Min-Sup KOR 2 Sep 92 Daegu 4 Jun
Masters on Women’s Pole Vault World List
N=797
List threshold=3.60m
10 4.70 Stacy Dragila USA 25 Mar 71 Chula Vista CA 22 Jun
242 4.00 Doris Auer AUT 10 May 71 Regensburg 8 Jun
405 3.81 Sandra van der Geer NED 25 May 72 Amsterdam 5 Jul
451 3.80 Béatrice Denis FRA 18 Jun 72 Amiens 18 Jun
470 3.80 Petra Pechstein SUI 26 Jul 71 Fribourg 2 Aug
714 3.60 Irie Hill GBR 16 Jan 69 Melbourne 9 Mar