Las Vegas’ Vashti Cunningham lying low before jumping high in Olympics
The bar has been raised. Now it’s a matter of seeing how high Vashti Cunningham can go.
As they say in the sport of Olympic high jumping, get over it.
On July 3 at the U.S. Olympic Trials for track and field, she got over it at 1.97 meters (6 feet, 5 1/2 inches). Just weeks removed from Bishop Gorman High and her senior prom, she finished second to Chaunte Lowe, a woman 14 years her senior, who got over it at 2.01 meters (6 feet, 7 inches). It has been more than a few years since Chaunte Lowe went to her senior prom.
Vashti Cunningham fell into the pit and into the international limelight. She qualified for the Summer Olympics in Brazil as a teenager.
She has put the people in charge of the Wheaties box on official notice.
Her coach and father is pretty famous, too.
Randall Cunningham is a former UNLV quarterback (and punter) and a College Football Hall-of-Famer and a two-time NFL Most Valuable Player — and a legendary star of a rudimentary video game called Tecmo Bowl. There was no stopping “QB Eagles” in the Tecmo Bowl.
If there was a Tecmo Bowl for track and field, Randall Cunningham’s precocious daughter would be the one jumping over tall buildings in single bounds, and then maybe the moon, although you’d never know it from her demeanor.
“I’m so appreciative just to be going to the Olympics,” she said during the media scrum after the Trials in Eugene, Oregon. “I’m much more thankful about that than disappointed about finishing second.”
This is what her coach and father said: “We have to keep the focus on the fact she’s 18 and having fun. She hasn’t near peaked yet. We haven’t done any real Olympic training.”
That was July 3. That was pretty much the last interviews the Cunninghams granted before they started real Olympic training.
Perhaps it’s a good idea to lie low before the Olympics.
Remember Dan and Dave and the ‘92 games in Barcelona?
Dan O’Brien and Dave Johnson were decathletes. They did not lie low before the Olympics. Reebok built a huge advertising campaign around their rivalry — the first TV spot aired during the Super Bowl.
Dan failed to qualify for Barcelona. Dave settled for a bronze medal. Reebok wiped egg from its face.
There’s a lot of pressure to perform at the Olympics, if you let it get to you.
FLOPPING INTO HISTORY
There’s usually a small room under the track and field stadium where the athletes go before it’s time to jump over the bar, or put the shot, or run like the wind. They call it the holding room. It’s where you feel the pressure mount; it’s where you stare down the other competitors, if you’re so inclined.
Maybe all eyes won’t be trained on Vashti Cunningham in the holding room. But a lot of eyes will be. Chaunte Lowe is the betting favorite to win the women’s high jump; Cunningham is close behind, along with Ruth Beitia of Spain and Blanka Vlasic of Croatia.
A gold medal cannot be won in the holding room. But if you let the pressure and the size of the stage and the enormity of the moment overwhelm you, you can lose one there.
Dick Fosbury said they didn’t have a holding room at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.
The high jump was reinvented when the skinny kid from Oregon ran up to the bar and jumped over it backwards, head first, then the feet. Thus was born the Fosbury Flop — the same technique Vashti Cunningham and the older high-jumpers will employ at the Olympic Stadium in Rio after they emerge from the holding room.
Dick Fosbury was 21, three years older — three years more grizzled — than Randall Cunningham’s lithesome daughter when he won the gold medal in politically charged Mexico City. It wasn’t about the Nike deal then, as it partly is for Vashti Cunningham, or the Reebok deal, as it was for Dan and Dave.
It was about winning the gold medal. To a lesser extent, it was about where you stood on social matters.
“You can see it when I’m standing there, psyching myself up to get the adrenaline flowing — it’s a managed level of excitement,” Fosbury, 71, said from his home in Idaho.
“(But) I was nervous. I don’t remember sleeping the night before.”
The next day he would win the gold medal. He went 2.24 meters — 7 feet, 4 1/4 inches, an Olympic record. He had raised the bar.
He thinks Vashti Cunningham can raise it again for the women, that the sky may be her only limit, but that the clouds are well within her reach.
HIGH ON VASHTI
Dick Fosbury said he was in Eugene for the trials and was gobsmacked at the ease with which young Vashti Cunningham flopped over the bar.
“She was phenomenal. What a good attitude, and her disposition is very mature. I got a friend of mine to introduce me to her and Randall the day before she jumped,” Fosbury said.
“Based on my observation, her technique is fine. But what’s really amazing is her conditioning. You can tell (Randall) is a strong influence.”
Fosbury remains a student of the game. He uses terms such as “bio-mechanic analysis” in describing what goes into making a great high jumper even greater. And then he said based on what he saw in Eugene, you can throw bio-mechanic analysis right out the window. The Cunningham girl already has risen above his level of expertise, he says.
“From my perspective, she’s doing everything correctly. She’s very much in control. She seems to have a great head.
“Let’s just hope Vashti has a great day and a great experience.”
A managed level of excitement, isn’t that what Dick Fosbury calls it?
Vashti Cunningham has been lying low. Like the man who showed the other high jumpers a better way to do it in Mexico City, she admits to losing sleep over the enormity of the moment — but not the one engendered by the holding room, or by an up close and personal meeting with Bob Costas, should there be one after the medals are divvied up.
This is what she wrote via her Twitter account on July 14: “How can I fall asleep knowing I get to go to Whole Foods tomorrow.”
Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski
