Acuff
orients career towards World record ambition
Duncan Mackay for the
IAAF
17 May 2002 -
Amy Acuff has always been a bit different to her competitors. She has posed
provocatively in magazines and high jumped in everything from fake fur tops to
skin-coloured suits. Now she is studying eastern medicine in an attempt to try
and help her become the World’s finest ever high jumper.
The American who has a personal best of 2m and was the seventh highest jumper in 2001 with a clearance of 1.98m, has enrolled at the Academy of Oriental Medicine in Austin, Texas. There she will spend three years studying the secrets of the east in an attempt to unlock her potential. It’s something Acuff has been interested in since acupuncture helped cure her of injury four years ago.
“Injuries that would have dragged on for weeks were cleared up in one acupuncture session,” she said. “I realised that for most of my sports injuries and things in general, western medicine really couldn't help me at all except to give me a pill”.
“With acupuncture you have to set aside your resistance to not knowing the mechanism by which it works. You base your evaluation on it on results. It resonated with me because that’s the way I handled my high jumping. I’m learning to control my mind rather than my mind controlling me.
“I would keep the things that worked and discard what didn’t work. That’s what they've done with this medicine, except I’ve been working on high jumping for 15 years and they've been working on this medicine for thousands of years.”
Acuff, 26, is arguably the most photographed female athlete in the world. The 6ft 2in blonde has appeared in Esquire, Rolling Stone, Vogue, Maxim and Glamour and she was recently voted the fourth sexiest athlete in the world by ESPN (the winner was Russian tennis player Anna Kournikova).
But it’s her high jumping Acuff wants to be remembered for not the glamorous photo-shoots. “I feel like I’ve been standing on the precipice for a few years of tapping into something that's going to allow me to jump really high,” she said. “I know the different tools are there. Now it's a matter of finding the right combination of things and ways of thinking. That’s what keeps me going.”
While other athletes dream of medals, Acuff’s sights are set firmly on Bulgarian Stefka Kostadinova’s 15-year-old world record of 2.09m. “I'm not so big on the competitive aspect anymore,” said the Texan, whose personal best is 2.00m. “I’m more interested in jumping really high, of proving that I can do it. Other athletes think I'm crazy, but I’d rather have the world record than an Olympic gold medal.”
We did say that Amy Acuff was a little bit different.
