Pole Vaulting in the Olympics
Pole vaulting is a very interesting sport; a long flexible pole is used to clear the highest height possible by an athlete. This sport is one of the most technically difficult athletic sports in the Olympics at the moment. It has
a long and diverse history that stretches back hundreds of years. The sport is similar to the high jump but instead of an athlete running and jumping off the ground, in pole vaulting, a long flexible pole is used to catapult a vaulter off the ground and over
a bar placed at a certain height. It is one of the most popular track and field events that take place at the Olympics and looks like it will remain so for a long time to come.
Using poles to jump over things is an activity that’s been around for aeons. In the ancient world they were used to cross bodies of water that did not have bridges built on them or were too far to go around. There would be long
poles in every home and they were used to cross over water without getting wet. A lot of the time people would probably have fallen into the water and met their deaths as a result of the poles breaking or giving away beneath them.
This feat of jumping over things using poles led to the first competition taking place in 1843 in Cumbria. The modern version of the sport started in 1850 in Germany and it became part of the athletics programme at the time. The
modern technique that is used today was developed in America in the late 1800s. Initially the poles that were used were made out of hard materials such as bamboo or aluminium but over time they started to be made with more flexible materials such as carbon
fibre and fibreglass. This was done in order to give the poles some bend and not cause injury to the vaulter while being able to achieve greater height by propelling the athlete higher in the air.
The way the sport takes place today is that a competitor will enter a competition and pick a starting height that they will try and clear. They will then have three tries to clear that height; if they manage to clear it, they will
move on to the next height that they choose and so on. They end their run if they are unable to clear a bar set at a height after three attempts. The final score they receive is for the height they were able to clear. It is similar to the high jump and both
sports are judged in the same way as well.
In the past, the sport of pole vaulting was dominated by America which won gold in every official Olympic Games from 1896 all the way up to 1968. That is a long time to keep winning gold and other countries tried to break the USA’s
dominance of the sport. In the 1972 Olympic Games, the American team was using poles made with carbon fibre and the East German team objected to their use. The IAAF decided that firstly, the poles should not have carbon fibre in them and then secondly stated
that the other teams did not have enough access to the new poles to practice with because they took too long to arrive through the normal supply chains. Due to this reason, the IAAF for that year banned the use of the new poles and gave all the competitors
older poles to use. As a result of this, the American pole vault champion could only achieve silver and the German athlete got gold that year.
There is another type of pole vault event that takes place in the Netherlands today called ‘Fierljeppen’ and it is exactly like pole vaulting except it does not require a person to scale a height but cross the longest distance
instead. It seems to have originated from the ancient practice of using poles to leap over bodies of water. It is a very popular event these days and attracts numerous people from all over the world.
The current world record stands at an impressive 6.14 metres set by legendary pole vaulting champion, Sergey Bubka from the Ukraine. This record was set in 1994 and is yet to be broken; maybe someone will be able to top it in the
coming few years but it looks unlikely. This exciting sport will see a lot of great athletes come and go but it will remain one of the most popular track and field events of the Olympics.
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