The 24-year-old had finished second in the Soviet Union's trials for the inaugural world athletics championships in 1983, booking a ticket to Helsinki, Finland.Or so he thought.
"(The selectors) said to me, 'We know this will be hard for you . . . we've got a young prodigy who is really promising and he has a really bright future. We want to take him instead'," Parnov recalled.
The prodigy was a 19-year-old named Sergey Bubka, who went on to win the Helsinki title and held the crown for 14 years, defending it at five championships.
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