Why they rank here
Bubka owned the pole vault so completely that he made a business of the record book. He broke the world record 35 times — 17 outdoors and 18 indoors — famously raising it a centimetre at a time to collect appearance bonuses, and became the first human to clear both 6.00m (in 1985) and 6.10m. His outdoor record of 6.14m, set in 1994, stood for 26 years until Armand Duplantis surpassed it in 2020. He won six consecutive World Championship titles between 1983 and 1997, an unmatched run of global dominance. The paradox is his single Olympic gold, in Seoul 1988: freak weather, injury and one catastrophic no-height in Barcelona 1992 denied a vaulter who was, on any given day, untouchable. Judged on the event he transformed and the records he stockpiled, Bubka is the most dominant field-event athlete the sport has produced.
Career profile
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