Injury Brings Down Tully’s Bid to Reach New Heights

The space race has become passe in these days of glasnost, but it continues among pole vaulters from the Soviet Union and United States who keep launching themselves ever farther into the celestial vault.

The Soviet vaulters have edged ahead, though, and their idea of perestroika is routinely adding a few centimeters to the world pole vault record.

Keeping up with the Jonesenovs, then, has been more difficult for Encino’s Mike Tully, who increased his personal best by an inch during 1984-88 but fell from fourth to ninth in the world rankings.

Still recovering from an Achilles’ tendon tear of a year ago, Tully could only manage a 17-foot, 8 1/2-inch effort Sunday in the Jack in the Box Invitational at UCLA’s Drake Stadium. He tied Earl Bell for fourth place. Tim Bright, an Olympic decathlete competing unattached, won the event with a mark of 18-8 1/4.

Tully left Monday for a tour of Europe, where he will continue vaulting and rehabilitating his Achilles’ tendon.

“I still think I’m the best guy in the U. S. when I get healthy and get going,” Tully said. “I don’t know about the world. Those damn Russians, who knows about them.”

While the damn Yankees won every Olympic pole vault gold medal before 1972, the Soviets now hold the top three positions in the world rankings, and world record-holder Sergei Bubka goes higher than Sputnik.

Tully, 32, might not be able to catch Bubka but, after ranking in the U. S. top 10 for 13 of the past 14 years, he’s conceding nothing to his domestic rivals.

“It’s been frustrating like you wouldn’t believe,” Tully said. “Only a year ago I jumped 19 feet three weeks in a row. I was dominant in the U. S. I was about ready to make a breakthrough last year when I got hurt.”

Tully, 6-2 3/4 and 198 pounds, injured his right Achilles’ tendon midway through the 1988 summer schedule. After taking one vault in the Olympic Trials final, he succumbed to the pain and opted for surgery last August. The tendon was partially torn, vertically rather than horizontally, and Tully now wears a zipper-like scar on his ankle.

Tully, a 1978 graduate of UCLA, has endured a number of injuries during his 18-year career, but he said that the torn Achilles’ was his most painful.

He will try to work the kinks out on his upcoming trip to Europe. Tully plans to stay for about six weeks and will kick off his schedule Thursday in Grosseto, Italy.

“I’m sort of going over there and using it as a training program,” Tully said. “It’s sort of hard when you don’t have the background in training. This is the best year (post-Olympics) to have things go wrong. . . . I’ve got a better golf game now than I do pole vaulting.”

Only now able to compete without favoring his injury, Tully still believes he is probably one major injury from the end of his career.

“He’s just too old,” Bell, 33, jokingly said of Tully. “He doesn’t age gracefully like me. He always asks me what he’s doing wrong, and I just say, ‘You’re too old.”’

Bell and Tully have dominated U. S. pole vaulting since they broke into the national top 10 in 1975. Tully won silver and Bell bronze in the 1984 Olympics, and each has been the top-ranked vaulter in the country four times.

Tully won the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. meet in 1978, the Amateur Athletic Union/The Athletics Congress meet in 1977, 1979 and 1986 and the Olympic Trials in 1984. In international competition, he has won World Cup titles in 1977 and 1979 and the Pan American Games in 1983 and 1987.

He has earned more medals than the guys who charged up San Juan Hill, but he hasn’t lost his taste for more, particularly that elusive Olympic gold.

“I’m a full-time athlete, and you’ve got to think that way, too,” Tully said. “My main goal is to get two more good years in ’91 and ’92.”