Right when Russ Buller was grounded, all his future plans went up in the air.
Buller hurt his left hamstring attempting to clear 18-6.5 Sunday in the pole vault final. He finished fourth overall, one spot away from making his first Olympic team.
Buller, 29, planned on making the Olympic this year and quitting the sport the next. He was going to start chiropractic school and follow his wife, Dana, the Canadian record holder in the pole vault, to the Cayman Islands for her medical schooling. They were going to try and start a family, and “move on with our lives.”
“It was going to be my last try,” he said. “I’m going to have to sit back with my wife and try to figure out what’s next.”
He felt the hurt of fourth place in more places than one.
The 2000 NCAA champion at Louisiana State University had been talked back into the sport by his brother Jordan during a car ride home in the fall of 2004, when Buller had taken over as head coach at McNeese State in his hometown of Lake Charles, La.
Two weeks later, Jordan died in a car accident.
Standing in the media tent after watching Derek Miles, Jeff Hartwig and Brad Walker make the Olympic team ahead of him, Buller was proud of his performance, then remembered his brother’s advice.
“He was the reason I got back in,” he said, choking up.
After he hurt himself, he looked in the stands and saw Dana, who injured herself finishing fourth at the Canadian Olympic Trials, but was given four weeks to see how she jumps healthy. That’s when he couldn’t hold back his emotions any longer.
“She’s kind of beat up right now, too,” he said.
“You want to give it your best and I did that and I can live with that. I literally hurt myself giving it my best,” he said. “I can’t end like this.”
He won’t have to. A track fortuitously stands two miles from the Buller’s newly purchased home in the Caymans.
“You get beat down, you just gotta get back up,” he said.
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