Why stop at 7 arrows and not just keep going until he failed?
Otherwise you just get one award you can never beat.
Double so if there are monetary prizes involved.
I’ve been saying for years that someone needs to reign in Big Keyhole Arrows but the regulators have been asleep at the wheel as per usual. Thanks a lot, (Congress)/(Brussels)/(Obama I guess).
Whereas the eight shot here - if you miss it you still have your seven good ones.
"Once the vaulter enters the competition, they can choose to pass heights. If a vaulter achieves a miss on their first attempt at a height, they can pass to the next height, but they will only have two attempts at that height, as they will be out once they achieve three consecutive misses. Similarly, after earning two misses at a height, they could pass to the next height, when they would have only one attempt.
The competitor who clears the highest height is the winner. "
So, it takes some planning, and some athletes start at heights that they know they will clear easy, just to guarantee them 2nd or 3rd place. Then they continue their attempts at higher bars. Once they know they have won they have 3 more attempts to try and break the record.
Not sure what and how they paid him (if anything), but it wouldn’t have been a Soviet thing.
Also, his last record set in 1994 stood for mighty 20 years and was finally broken on 15 Feb 2014, in Donetsk, of all places. ...
... I don't think we'll see international pole vaulting events in Donetsk in the next 20 years.
Or maybe he had to stop because the arrows break down when passing through the hole. For example, I don’t think it’s good for the fletching (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletching)
Or he had 1000 arrows, fired them all through they that keyhole 10 times in a row and they cut out the first 9,993 hits because that made the video boringly long ;-)