Valery Brumel: How to Break a Leg, Defy Gravity, and Come Back

Gravity is an uncompromising thing. It does not forgive mistakes, does not give discounts for past merits, and does not look at the passport, which says "Olympic champion." For Valery Brumel, gravity was not an enemy for a long time, but a dance partner. He soared over the bar as if the laws of physics were written for someone else. Until that rainy October evening, when the asphalt of the Yauza embankment harshly reminded him: humans are not meant to fly.

If you look at the chronicle of those years, you will not see a simple jump. You will see an explosion. Brumel used the straddle technique - he rolled onto the bar with his stomach, wrapping around it like a predator around its prey. Six world records. Gold in Tokyo 1964. Three times recognized as the best athlete in the world. He was so loved in the USA that during the USSR-USA athletics matches, stadiums with hundreds of thousands of people chanted his name, forgetting about the Cold War. John F. Kennedy shook his hand.

He was an absolute celestial being. Young, handsome, invincible. Life seemed like an endless straight line leading only upwards. To the mark of 2.30 meters, which he dreamed of so much.

The crunch of bone is louder than applause

October 5, 1965. Fine, nasty Moscow rain. Brumel gets on a motorcycle as a passenger with a familiar motorcycle racer, Tamara Golikova. Speed, wet asphalt, sharp turn, oil slick. The motorcycle flies into a pole.

It happened in a split second. Brumel instinctively put out his right leg. That one. The push-off leg. The leg in which that very cosmic spring was hidden, raising him to unprecedented heights. The impact was so strong that the foot hung on tendons alone. The bones were crushed into rubble.

Then there were hospitals. The smell of ether, the cold light of lamps and the dry voices of surgeons discussing his leg as if it were a broken machine part. The verdict sounded like a death sentence: amputation. The doctors honestly said that there was nothing to save - suppuration had begun, the bones did not fuse.

"I lay in the ward, looked at the ceiling and realized that yesterday I was the best in the world, and today I am a disabled person who they want to cut off his leg. The phone went silent. Many of those who patted me on the shoulder yesterday simply disappeared," Brumel himself later recalled.

They saved his leg. Sewed it up, assembled it like a broken vase. But it became three centimeters shorter. For an ordinary person - a reason to buy orthopedic shoes and come to terms with it. For a high jumper - the end of everything. Thirty-two operations. Three years on crutches. Most in his place would have become alcoholics or gone crazy with self-pity. But Brumel was made of a different stuff.

Mechanic of human souls and bones

And then in this story a second genius appears - Dr. Gavriil Ilizarov from Kurgan. At that time, his methods were considered almost witchcraft, and official Soviet medicine looked down on him. Ilizarov invented an apparatus made of rings and spokes that pierced the bone through and through. It sounds like a torture device from the time of the Inquisition. In general, that's how it felt.

Brumel went to Kurgan. Ilizarov promised not only to restore his normal gait, but also to stretch his leg to the missing centimeters. Millimeter by millimeter. The nuts on the apparatus had to be tightened every day, tearing the resulting bone callus, forcing the body to grow new tissue. It was agony.

Now imagine the picture. Winter. Snowy Kurgan. A man with iron in his leg walks down the clinic corridor. And not just walks. Brumel, with the Ilizarov apparatus on his right leg, squatted with a barbell. He trained right there, in the ward, clenching his teeth so hard that they seemed to crumble. He wasn't just going to walk. He was going to fly.

A height that is greater than the record

1969. Stadium. Almost four years after the asphalt took his career, Brumel returns to the jumping sector. He is 27 years old. His right leg is scarred, it looks thinner than his left, it has survived hell.

The bar is set at 2.05 meters. For the former Brumel - a warm-up height, he took it in a tracksuit. For the current Brumel - Everest. The stands froze. In this silence, only the sound of his spikes on the tartan track could be heard.

Run-up. A push off with that very leg that they wanted to cut off. Flight. He flies over the bar and falls on the mats. The bar didn't even flinch.

He took 2.05. Then 2.06. And you know, it wasn't a world record. It wasn't even a Union record. But those who saw this jump cried. Because it wasn't a jump over a piece of fiberglass. It was a jump over one's own weakness, over pain, over the verdict of doctors and the laws of nature.

Valery Brumel never regained the title of world champion. The injury made itself felt, the ligaments no longer had the same elasticity. But he proved the main thing - a person cannot be broken if he does not agree to it himself.

Later he will write books, become a playwright, his plays will be staged in theaters. He will reinvent himself when sports leave his life completely. But in history, he will forever remain a man who fell from the sky onto concrete, smashed to smithereens, and then put himself back together piece by piece - to take off at least one more time.