Pole vault

• 1. Introduction

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  Pole vault is a track and field event in which an athlete uses a long, flexible pole to clear a bar suspended high above the ground. What sounds straightforward is, in practice, one of the most technically demanding feats in all of athletics. Speed, agility, strength, and a gymnast's spatial awareness are all prerequisites. And then there is the equipment: poles of fiberglass or carbon fiber, mats thick enough to absorb a fall from several meters up, and a rulebook that runs to fine-grained detail about wind, broken poles, and what happens when two vaulters end the day at the exact same height.

  The discipline has roots stretching back thousands of years, yet the question of who first turned a pole into a measured athletic contest has a surprisingly specific answer. How did wooden spears become precision-engineered fiberglass tubes? What does a gymnast's background have to do with clearing a bar? And what rules govern the split-second chaos of a fly-away? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Ancient Origins

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  Stone engravings and artifacts dating to around 2500 BC show ancient Egyptians using spears to mount enemy structures and cross irrigation ditches. That practical technique shares its DNA with the modern event. Ancient Greek vases and pots depict poles being used to jump onto or over objects, suggesting the practice spread across the Mediterranean world.

  From around 1800 BC to around 550 BC, a sport closely related to pole vaulting was probably part of the Irish Tailteann Games. There is an important distinction here: the Irish version may have prized distance rather than height, with farmers using poles to clear canals and rivers rather than to scale a measured bar. The leap from a utilitarian crossing technique to a calibrated athletic contest waited many centuries.

  The person credited with that transformation is the German teacher Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths, who formalized modern pole vaulting in the 1790s. GutsMuths set out the jumping standards, the recommended approach distance, the correct hand grip, and the underlying principles of the jump. The sport took hold first in Germany, then spread to the United Kingdom and the United States. The earliest recorded competition in England where height was specifically measured took place at the Ulverston Football and Cricket Club in Lancashire in 1843, and the event appeared on the program of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896.

• 3. The Evolution of the Pole

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  Early competitors vaulted with poles cut from ash or hickory wood. As recorded heights crept upward, materials had to keep pace. Bamboo poles arrived in 1904, followed by tubular aluminum and steel after 1945, each generation bending more efficiently and storing more energy.

  Glass fiber poles drew significant attention in the American press in the early 1960s, though the material was not actually new then. Herb Jenks had been manufacturing fiberglass poles since 1948, and Bob Mathias used one when he won the decathlon at the 1952 Olympics. What changed in the 1960s was the record books. John Uelses set a new world record with a fiberglass pole on the 2nd of February 1962. In February 1963, UCLA's C. K. Yang and two other vaulters surpassed the standing world record within a nine-day period, all using fiberglass.

  The manufacturing process itself became a subject of patents. James Monroe Lindler of the Columbia Products Company in Columbia, South Carolina, filed a patent application on the 10th of March 1967 for a vaulting pole of hollow construction with an integral helical winding. His patent was granted on the 27th of January 1970. The process wraps glass-fiber tape impregnated with resin around a metal mandrel, bakes it in an oven, and then removes the mandrel to leave a hollow tube. Lindler based his approach on a method used to manufacture glass-fiber golf clubs, which had been patented by the Woolley Manufacturing Company of Escondido, California, in 1954.

  Carbon fiber entered the picture in 2007, following a patent granted in 2006 to David J. Dodge and William C. Doble of the Alliance Design and Development Group in New York City. A separate innovation, called Carbon Weave, was filed in September 2005 by Jeffrey P. Watry, Ralph W. Paquin, and Kenneth A. Hursey of Gill Athletic in Champaign, Illinois; their patent was granted on the 21st of October 2008. Carbon fiber is now added to the older E-glass and S-glass materials to produce a lighter pole with specific performance characteristics.

• 4. Technique Phase by Phase

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  Top-class vaulters use an approach of 18 to 22 strides, a distance counted in pairs so that 18 strides becomes a nine-step and 22 strides becomes an 11-step. The pole tip stays angled above eye level until three paces from the box, then drops efficiently as the pole plants into the trapezoidal metal pit at the end of the runway. The back wall of that box is roughly eight inches deep; the bottom slopes upward about three feet until it is level with the runway surface.

  As the pole slides into the back of the box and begins to bend, the vaulter jumps off the trail leg and drives the front knee forward, leaving the body in what coaches describe as a backwards C position. The swing phase that follows is a race against the pole's rebound: the vaulter rows the top arm down toward the hips while keeping the trail leg straight, storing as much potential energy as possible in the bending pole. The result is a double-pendulum motion, with the top of the pole pivoting from the box while the vaulter acts as a second pendulum pivoting from the top hand.

  Extension follows: the hips drive upward with legs outstretched, the shoulders drive down, and the vaulter reaches full inversion, upside down above the bar. As the pole recoils and propels the body upward, the vaulter turns 180 degrees toward the pole, angling toward the crossbar. The fly-away, often the phase that draws the loudest reaction from spectators, is described in technical literature as the easiest part of the vault and largely a product of correct execution in all the phases before it. The vaulter's center of gravity actually passes underneath the crossbar at the moment the hips are at their highest point, in a position compared to the crotch of an upside-down V. The correct landing is on the back or shoulders, near the center of foam mats that are typically one to one-and-a-half meters thick.

• 5. Competition Rules

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  Each vaulter chooses the height at which they enter the competition, and once they enter, they have three attempts to clear that height. A miss at the first attempt carries forward: if a vaulter then passes to the next height, they arrive there with only two attempts remaining before three consecutive misses end their day. The same logic applies after two misses; passing to the next height leaves the vaulter with a single attempt. A result of "NH," no height, means the vaulter failed to clear any bar during the competition.

  Time limits are built into the rules and scale with how many athletes remain. While all vaulters are still competing, each has one minute per attempt. When three athletes remain, that window expands to two minutes; two remaining vaulters get three minutes each; and the last vaulter standing gets five minutes on the runway.

  Ties are resolved by the number of misses at the final height cleared. If that is also equal, the total count of misses across the whole competition decides it. A persistent tie for first place triggers a jump-off, a sudden-death contest starting at the last attempted height. If both vaulters miss, the bar drops by a small increment; if both clear, it rises. Marks set in a jump-off are valid for any purpose a mark from a normal competition would be. Ties for places other than first are generally left unresolved, unless the tie falls on the final qualifying spot, in which case an administrative jump-off breaks it, but those marks count for nothing beyond the tie.

  One rule curiosity addresses wind and poles: if a vaulter competing outdoors makes a clear effort to throw the pole away from the bar but wind blows it back into contact, the clearance stands. That judgment belongs to the pole vault official. If the pole itself breaks during a vault, the attempt is ruled a non-jump and counts as neither a make nor a miss.

• 6. Record Breakers

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  Sergey Bubka became the first pole vaulter to clear six meters in 1985, and went on to set the men's indoor world record in Donetsk on the 21st of February 1993. Yelena Isinbayeva, who had a background in gymnastics, set the current women's outdoor world record on the 28th of August 2009 in Zurich. Isinbayeva was also the first woman to clear five meters, doing so on the 22nd of July 2005.

  Armand Duplantis has since rewritten the men's outdoor and indoor record books across multiple competitions. He set the current men's outdoor world record in Tokyo on the 15th of September 2025 and the current men's indoor world record in Uppsala on the 12th of March 2026. Duplantis first cleared six meters in the 2018 season and holds all top positions in the all-time outdoor lists by a substantial margin over Bubka, whose best outdoor mark was set in Sestriere on the 31st of July 1994.

  A rare and informal distinction called the "six metres club" tracks every male vaulter who has cleared that height. In the women's event, the parallel benchmark is five meters. As of the 2026 season, only four women have cleared five meters: Isinbayeva, Jennifer Suhr (who cleared indoors on the 2nd of March 2013), Sandi Morris (who cleared on the 9th of September 2016), and Anzhelika Sidorova (who cleared at the Diamond League final in Zurich on the 9th of September 2021). A 2000 rule change by the IAAF allowed world records to be set in facilities with or without a roof, making the indoor and outdoor marks interchangeable for record purposes in pole vault, an arrangement that applied to no other world record until 2022.