He now lives in a $2m apartment in Monte Carlo and has a string of business interests, among them a travel agency in Stockholm and a chain of bread shops in the Ukraine His riches, however, have been earned at a price. Certainly, no other has ever dominated his or her event so imperiously for so long “Why?” Andy Ashurst said. As his coach, Evgenyi Volobujev, remarked before the record-breaking hit its present hiatus: “The tragedy is he is capable of vaulting 6.40 but no one will see how good he really is.”Bubka, though, can hardly be blamed for becoming the ultimate high earner. The worry now is that Bubka, though still on top of the world at 34, has passed his peak. His vaulting ambition has become index linked to a bonus payment of $100,000 per record courtesy of his chief sponsor, Nike – hence the gradual inching towards his upper limit. It has not been in his interests to take a quantum Beamonesque leap. “He is simply an exceptional all-round athlete.” Bubka’s compact 6ft, 121/2st frame is packed with the agility of a gymnast, the power of a weightlifter and the speed of a sprinter; he was once timed for the final 10m before a vault at 0.978 sec (slightly faster, that is, than Ben Johnson’s average velocity in the 1988 Olympic 100m final).It is possible, though, that we will never see the very best of Bubka.

Indoors and out, he has broken 35 world records, eclipsing even the prolific deeds of Paavo Nurmi, the great Finnish distance runner.Add his six world titles – no other vaulter has stood atop the medal rostrum at the world championships – and Bubka can stake a claim to being the finest athlete of all time. His indoor best, five years old now, is 6.15.The son of a Red Army sergeant, Bubka almost drowned at the age of four when he fell into a barrel of water used for salting cabbage. At 19 he emerged with an unexpected gold medal from the inaugural world championships, in Helsinki in 1983, and has since propelled himself to living legend status. “I can remember it most of all,” he said, “because I turned up on the Thursday to train and the concrete in the vaulting box was wet.

Bubka had been there the night before and insisted it was changed. It wasn’t the right depth.”
It was a rare occasion on which Sergei, the more celebrated of the vaulting Bubka brothers from Donetsk, was concerned about depths. When he first competed in Britain, clearing a world record 5.90m outdoors at Crystal Palace in 1984, he asked for the bar to be raised to 6m The supports would lift it no higher than 5.92. Not that the Ukrainian’s gravity-defying upward mobility has been restrained by fixtures and fittings. On his most recent trip to Britain, for the Grand Prix final in 1993, he sailed over 6.05m at Crystal Palace and registered a narrow failure at 6.14, the height at which his outdoor world record has stood since 1994.