Short answers, pulled from the story.
Modern pole vaulting, in which height is officially measured, was established by the German teacher Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths in the 1790s. GutsMuths described jumping standards, approach distances, hand grip recommendations, and the principles of pole jumping. He is widely considered the father of modern pole vaulting.
Pole vault was included in the inaugural modern Olympic Games in 1896 for men. Women's pole vault became a full medal event at the Olympics in 2000.
Fiberglass vaulting poles are made by wrapping glass-fiber tape impregnated with resin around a metal mandrel, baking it, and removing the mandrel to leave a hollow tube. Herb Jenks began manufacturing them in 1948. Carbon fiber, added to E-glass and S-glass materials to reduce weight, was introduced to vaulting poles in 2007.
Armand Duplantis holds the men's outdoor world record, set in Tokyo on the 15th of September 2025, and the men's indoor world record, set in Uppsala on the 12th of March 2026. Yelena Isinbayeva holds the women's outdoor world record, set in Zurich on the 28th of August 2009.
Yelena Isinbayeva was the first woman to clear five meters, achieving the mark on the 22nd of July 2005. Three other women have since joined her: Jennifer Suhr in 2013, Sandi Morris in 2016, and Anzhelika Sidorova in 2021.
Ties are first resolved by the number of misses at the final height cleared; if still equal, by the total number of misses across the whole competition. A tie for first place that remains unresolved triggers a sudden-death jump-off starting at the last attempted height, with the bar moving up or down by small increments until one vaulter clears and the other misses.