Such has been the brilliant winter that Renaud Lavillenie has enjoyed, that a statue is being built in his hometown of Clermont-Ferrand.
But it will be a design with a difference. The construction, will reach 6.16m, the height which the brilliant Frenchman cleared in Donetsk in February to break Ukrainian Sergey Bubka’s 21-year-old indoor pole vault world record. And the statue, reports 20minutes.fr, will have a special mechanism, so that it can be increased should Lavillenie take the record even further. Lavillenie’s best clearance outdoors is 6.02m, 12 centimetres away from the world record that Bubka established in Sestriere in 1994, but the Frenchman has been in the type of form where anything could be possible this summer. His presence at the European Athletics Championships in Zurich will be heightened even more by his determination to reach these new landmarks and since his success in Donetsk he has spoken about reaching 6.20m or beyond. Lavillenie will be chasing a hat-trick of titles in Zurich, having won in Barcelona in 2010 with 5.85m and Helsinki with 2012 with 5.97m, while the European Championship record of 6.00m by Russia’s Rodion Gataullin in 1994 should come under serious threat. If he achieves a mark beyond 6.16m, his statue will respond. more
