Nine and a half metres of brown water, and a girl with the tape — second round

Jitske Boersma, on the sand

Right — bed's flat, I've just done it, you can go. And I mean I've just done it, so if you stand there fiddling with the shoe-plate for a minute that's fine, it stays flat, nothing blows about in this. There's no wind at all today. The flies are the only thing moving.

I measure. That's the whole job and it's not nothing. I do not jump and I'm not going to, so don't ask me about your plant, I'll tell you the number and that's what you get. The number comes off the tape from the pole's entry in the water to the nearest mark in the bed. Nearest. Not your heels. Not where you'd like it. Whichever dent in my sand is closest to the ditch, that's the one, and I'll read it twice.

People argue with me about this every single meet. Klaas from Grou argued with me twenty minutes ago with his backside still printed in the sand behind his heels like a stamp. Your heels were at 13,42. Your backside was at 12,71. Twelve seventy-one, Klaas. You landed beautifully and then you sat down and I have to measure the sitting down.

And he keeps walking on the bed before I've raked it, which is the other thing. Off. Round the edge, on the boards. If the old mark's still in there when you land I have to take the nearest of all of them and that could be somebody else's heel from two jumps ago and then everybody's shouting at the table and it's my tape they're shouting about.

Buttermilk's on the table under the cloth, it's still cold-ish, go and have some while I rake.

What actually decides the number

Nobody is vaulting. Nobody is swinging. You are standing on the foot of a column that is falling over, and everything you get is bought by keeping that column up a fraction longer while you climb it. Put the mass higher and the thing genuinely falls slower — longer radius, bigger moment, slower topple. That is the whole of it. The good ones are still going hand over hand at forty degrees. The ones who sit down on the shoe at seventy get dropped in the water and I write a nought.

Your run doesn't go into distance. It goes into how far past upright you can drive the pole before it thinks about coming back. Run too fast and you throw the plant long and land wet.

The shoe-plate is a flat disc for one reason: bare ends sink in ditch mud. Four centimetres in is four centimetres of pole gone and you give it all back at my end. And a pole that's been in the water is slippery for the rest of your round — climbs slower, honestly slower, I can see it from here.

Ditch is nine and a half. The best on this field is fifteen-eighty. That gap is about a second and a half of climbing, which is a mean thing to write down but there it is.

Score card

Chalked figures are read off the tape twice and called to the table before they go on the card. If you think a figure is wrong, come and look at the tape, not at me.