To Absent Friends - Bob Richards

American Olympic Champion Bob Richards died this past week at the age of 97.   If you had asked me earlier in the week "Bob Richards.  Dead or alive?", I would have failed.  Not only would I have said "dead", but I would have guessed that he have left us a long time ago.  In fact, when I heard that he had died, I was surprised to see that he was only 97 years old when he died.

Bob Richards was an Americon pole vaulter who competed for the USA in three separate Olympiads, 1948, 1952, and 1956, wherein he won Bronze, Gold, and Gold medals.  He remains to this day the only athlete to win Gold Medals in the pole vault in two separate Olympic Games.  His clean cut good looks and squeaky clean image - he was an ordained minister - made him immensely popular and recognizable, and he cashed in on those assets to become a corporate pitchman and motivational speaker.  It is estimated that he gave over 25,000 speeches to various sales conferences, Rotary Clubs, and Chamber of Commerce events in the course of his career.  He also became the first athlete to ever appear on a box of Wheaties.

I am old, but I am not old enough to remember Richards the Olympic athlete and hero.  I am old enough to remember seeing Richards appearing on commercials for Wheaties and other products and appearing on various television shows.  It seemed that, like the fictional Roy Kent, he was here, he was there, he was every where.  Then he wasn't.  He disappeared from view, or at least from my view, and he had not been in my thoughts for well over fifty years.

I posted on facebook about his death with the note that "I wonder how many reading this will be asking 'Who is Bob Richards?'", and it amazed me how many people, including people I consider to be astute sports historians, confessed that they had to Google the name to learn who he was.  Fame is, indeed, fleeting.

"The Vaulting Vicar"

In reading his obituaries, I learned that Richards ran for President in 1984 on the Populist Party ticket.  I had absolutely zero recollection of that.  Turns out that the leaders of the Populist Party were a sketchy bunch, who, among other pecidillos, were Holocaust deniers.  Richards later claimed that he regretted his affiliation with the Party.  Let us be kind and take him at his word on that.

Richards was of the era when pole vaulters used stiff metal poles and not the flexible fiber glass poles that we see today.  Richards lived to see his record height in the event of 15 feet, 6 inches surpassed not only by athletes everywhere, but even by his own children and grandchildren, and that fact generated this quote that was in the closing paragraphs of Richards' Washington Post  obituary:

Mr. Richards is still the only Olympic pole vaulter to win two gold medals, but he’s not the family’s lone record holder. Several of his children and grandchildren became competitive pole vaulters, surpassing his 15 feet 6 inches by several feet — though they weren’t vaulting with a metal pole.

“If you want to get a clear picture,” Mr. Richards once said, “give today’s vaulters a stiff pole.”

Like many great athletes who lived to an old age, even the great Bob Richards was not above Shouting at the clouds and telling the kids to get off his lawn.

RIP Bob Richards