Valery Brumel

Athlete

• Born: May 14, 1942
• Birthplace: Razvedki, Siberia, Soviet Union (now in Russia)
• Died: January 26, 2003
• Place of death: Moscow, Russia

Sport: Track and field (high jump)

Early Life

Valery Nikolayevich Brumel was born in the village of Razvedki, near Lake Baikal in the Siberian region of the Soviet Union, on May 14, 1942. His location in Siberia insulated him somewhat from the terrible hardships that afflicted the European area of his country during World War II. His father, a coal mining engineer, and his mother, a mine technician, moved out of Siberia after the war, settling in Voroshilovgrad (now Luhans’k) by the time Valery was ten years old. As a schoolboy there, Valery’s athletic prowess was first recognized.

The Road to Excellence

When Valery was of high school age, he read about high jumping. Already able to surpass his schoolmates in jumping contests, he decided to train himself to leap above his own height. At first, his training was piecemeal, gleaned from secondhand accounts of established high-jumping techniques. His conditioning was of a general nature: running, jumping rope, and doing endless calisthenics, especially squats. Soon his initial goal was surpassed—he jumped higher than his height, a bit more than 6 feet—and his success in school competitions attracted the attention of high-jump specialists.

With more expert coaching, young Valery developed a model high jumping technique: a fast running approach; a firm, but fluid, plant of his left leg; a graceful kick upward of his leading, right leg; and a compact roll over the bar with his left arm tucked snugly into his chest. Soon he cleared 6 feet 8 inches. Vladimir Dyachkov, a prominent coach and athletic official, suggested that Valery be considered for the Soviet Union’s 1960 Olympic team. Valery had graduated from high school and became a government-supported athlete, receiving a stipend from the Soviet State Committee for Physical Culture and Sports and from a Moscow track and field club called the Burevestnik Society.

Valery’s improvement in response to the full-time training regimen was dramatic. Under Dyachkov’s tutelage, he began serious weight training for the first time, combining heavy leg exercises with stretching and flexibility movements. His running was turned into an exhausting series of all-out sprinting in order to conform to Dyachkov’s innovative “speed-strength” training methods. On August 13, 1960, in Moscow, he jumped 7 feet 1 1/2 inches, a new European record, and assured himself a place on the Soviet Olympic team.

The Emerging Champion

In the 1960 Rome Olympics, Valery took the silver medal, jumping 7 feet 1 inch, losing only to his teammate, Robert Shavlakadze. He had beaten the talented American champion, John Thomas, who took the bronze medal. In February of 1961, in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Valery bested Thomas again, equaling Thomas’s world indoor record of 7 feet 3 inches in the process. The American press took an immediate liking to Valery, still only eighteen years old. His handsome face, gray-green eyes, and short brown hair made him photogenic. His polite confidence made him a pleasure to interview even through a variety of interpreters.

From 1961 through 1965, no one jumped higher than Valery in any meet in which he appeared. On June 18, 1961, in Moscow, he raised the world record in the high jump to 7 feet 3 3/4 inches; then, a month later, raised it to 7 feet 4 1/4 inches. On August 31, in Sofia, Bulgaria, he raised the record for the third time that year, to 7 feet 4 1/2 inches. In the spring of 1962, before an audience of eighty-one thousand at Stanford University in California, he raised the world record to 7 feet 5 inches, and in the fall of that year, in a relatively unimportant Moscow meet, he extended the record to 7 feet 5 1/2 inches.

Valery became an international sports celebrity, popular at home and abroad. He married a talented gymnast and received a prestigious Moscow apartment. He was able to buy and drive a foreign automobile, able to travel without cost wherever he wanted. A nonattending “student” at the Moscow Central Institute of Physical Culture, he continued his grueling regimen of weight training. “Weights,” he often said, “are my closest friends.”

In 1963, Valery’s marriage disintegrated when he left his wife to campaign internationally. In the United States, he resumed his duel with Thomas, capturing the world indoor record at 7 feet 4 inches. His return home to Moscow in July was a special triumph for him. In a United States-Soviet Union dual meet in Lenin Stadium, with an audience of more than seventy thousand, including Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Valery raised the world record to 7 feet 5 3/4 inches, a standard that stood for eight years.

He had jumped almost a foot and a half more than his own height. Acclaim came from all quarters. International sports organizations and publications recognized him as the best athlete in the world. In 1961, after having received the coveted Helms World Trophy Award, he was given the Golden Caravel of Columbus. The Soviet State Council of Physical Culture and Sports designated Valery a “master of sport.” He was awarded the Soviet Order of the Red Banner. In 1964, he became a member of the Communist Party.

As the 1964 Tokyo Olympics approached, it was obvious that Valery was off his form. In Soviet meets preparatory to the Olympics, he had two losses. Rumors of injury led to speculation that he might at last be defeated by Thomas, his old rival. However, Valery shook off some tough moments in the Olympic competition to prevail at an Olympic record 7 feet 1 3/4 inches. Winning the Olympic gold medal in Tokyo was the high point of his athletic career. In 1965, his campaigning revealed that he had been nursing a severe knee injury for some time and that physical rehabilitation was necessary.

Continuing the Story

The most impressive aspect of Valery’s athletic greatness derived not from his world-record jumps, nor even from his Olympic triumphs. What most qualified him as a great athlete was his inspirational personal response to tragedy. On the night of October 6, 1965, he was riding as a rear-seat passenger on a girlfriend’s motorcycle when it was driven at high speed into a Moscow bridge abutment. Valery was thrown against the base of a lamppost. His right leg was terribly smashed and broken. Doctors were forced to consider amputation, but in a six-hour operation, Dr. Ivan Kucharenko, a prominent trauma specialist, saved the leg by piecing the bone fragments together “like a mosaic.”

Valery spent most of the next three years in a succession of casts, fighting osteomyelitis with a variety of drug therapies. An early attempt to regain function of the leg resulted in its deformation; it was an inch shorter than the other. It had to be rebroken and reset with an innovative sleeving technique developed by Dr. Gavril Ilizarov, a surgeon from Kurgan in Siberia.

During his ordeal, Valery gained the maturity that renown had so long postponed. He remarried and found the time to study, graduating from the Central Institute of Physical Culture in 1967. After the casts were finally behind him in late 1968, Valery, working as a coach for youth groups, resolved to jump again. His coaches, including Dyachkov, considered his return to competitive standards impossible. However, he worked so hard that, by June of 1969, after almost four years of debility, he was again competitive at heights approaching seven feet. International sports publications called his return to competition the “comeback of the century.” Clearly his remaining competitive career, even though undistinguished by world records or Olympic victories, made Valery a legend in track and field.

After many years of struggling to advance the financial cause of full-time athletes in unpaid sports, Valery was, in 1990, awarded one of the first Soviet governmental pensions for his endeavors as a world-class athlete. A well-known resident of Moscow, he continued to coach aspiring youth. Valery died in 2003.

Summary

Before he was twenty years old, Valery Brumel won worldwide acclaim as one of the first to high-jump more than 7 feet. He won two Olympic medals and set five world records in his chosen sport. His return to clearing 7-foot bars after the near amputation of his leg served as an inspiration to track and field athletes everywhere.

Bibliography

Litsky, Frank. “Valery Brumel Is Dead at Sixty; Russian Set High-Jump Marks.” The New York Times, January 28, 2003, p. C15.

Wallechinsky, David, and Jaime Loucky. The Complete Book of the Olympics: 2008 Edition. London: Aurum Press, 2008.

Watman, Mel. Encyclopedia of Track and Field Athletics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981.