Pogo experts take bouncing to a new level

Exhibition at regatta shows how sport has changed since advent of compressed air stick

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Like so many of the several hundred people who crammed to the Allegheny River front at 6 p.m. Saturday to see a pogo stick exhibition, Chris Uhren and Meghan Bray thought they were coming to see some local pogo enthusiasts from a local club who just happened to like this underground sport.

“I wasn’t sure what to expect,” Ms. Bray, 23, of Friendship, said. “We heard yesterday that there were these people who were flipping around on pogo sticks and we just wanted to see it.”

“I just figured it was some little local club,” Mr. Uhren, 25, said after the show, “not some big company that performs all over the country and internationally. “That was [really] incredible.” (NOTE: Mr. Uhren was so excited by the performance he used a different adjective than “really” that we can’t print in a family newspaper.)

Turns out, they, and several hundred other people at the Three Rivers Regatta saw two of the world’s best pogo athletes perform: “Danger” Russ Kaus, 24, of Fairfax, Va., and Michael Mena, 25, formerly of Colorado Springs but recently moved to Pittsburgh, who finished second in the pogo world championships (yes, they have a world championship; the most recent one was in Wilkinsburg).

During their 25-minute exhibition of hard-to-fathom tricks, jumps, leaps and flips, several as much as 9 or 10 feet off the ground, they demonstrated the bounds to which pogoers have just begun to go in the 15 years since the modern, compressed air pogo stick went into production.

No longer limited by less bouncy, spring-fueled pogo sticks many in the crowd said they used as kids, the compressed air sticks are clearly what Winnie the Pooh’s buddy Tigger would choose.

It is also what is fueling what