Well, this hardly reached any heights, as of the 31 entrants, only 10 managed to clear 5.70m - 5cm short of the automatic qualifying height.

This provoked something of a debate between competitors and judges over the qualifying status of some, with Aleksandr Averbukh (ISR) and Fabio da Silva (BRA), both going through having jumped 5.65.

In the case of Averbukh, he had no failures on his card and passed at 5.70 in anticipation of jumping again at 5.75. Once the discussion had established that would not be necessary, he was happy to pack up his poles and offer thumbs up to anyone around.

For da Silva, the judgement on his qualification was a little more tricky: a fail at 5.40 was followed by a third-time clearance at 5.55, but he went over 5.65 first time. This gave him the nod over the likes of Feiliang Liu (CHN) and Yevgeniy Lukyanenko, who had failures at 5.65.

But that height was also too much for two experienced competitors and potential medallists, Paul Burgess (AUS) and 39-year-old Jeff Hartwig (USA), who both fouled out.
 
The early heights had done little to reduce the field: Pavel Prokopenko, Russia's 17-year-old European under-23 champion, exhibited big-stage nerves and no-heighted at 5.40 and Oleksandr Korchmid, of Ukraine, with three fails at 5.55, were among the early casualties, while Tim Lobinger (GER) clung on grimly, needing three attempts to clear 5.55. He survived to clear 5.70 first time, to join Russians Igor Pavlov and Denys Yurchenko, Steve Hooker (AUS), and his team mates Bjorn Otto and Danny Ecker in Saturday's final.

Osaka 2007 News Team/sd