by Stuart Weir
Last year, at the Budapest 2023, Stuart Weir wrote a piece, An Epic Pole Vault Competition. It soon became our most famous story of the 2023 World Championships.
Stuart Weir, our senior writer for Europe, completes an arduous journey to the Stade de France each day, using the Metro, stairs (few elevators), and two security stops, all to get to the stadium and cover the Olympics for you, our readers.
An epic pole vault competition
Nina Kennedy won an epic pole vault competition as the only athlete to clear 4.90. The way the qualification process panned out, we finished up with 19 athletes in the final instead of the minimum of 12. That all made for a long evening. And on a technical matter, bronze-medalist Alyisha Newman (Canada) said that the space for 19 coaches was inadequate and too far away, stressing that you really want your coach close in the most important event of the year – perhaps on the infield.
The competition started with everyone clearing 4.40, but by the height of 4.80, the field had been cut to five. That process had taken 104 vaults. With constant stadium announcements for track events and the semi-finals of the 200 starting just behind the pole vault, there were constant delays. In addition, the bar seemed to go up and down regularly between jumps – in the press conference, Kennedy referred to the mechanism breaking at a crucial moment. I remember seeing Katie Moon – second to jump – taking off her tracksuit, preparing, then putting it back on again. Athletes regularly picked up their poles and waited for the signal to go but finished putting the pool down and restarting their routine later. It was a complicated evening requiring a lot of stop-start. Every time Marie-Julie Bonnin was on the runway, home crowd support was incredible, or as Nina Kennedy put it, “When a French girl is jumping, the crowd went insane, and I had to back away and calm myself.”
From a British point of view, it was poignant to read on every screen “World lead Molly Caudery 4.92” and to be constantly reminded that a miscalculation or mismanagement of her qualification left Molly with just a “no mark” recorded in the biggest competition of an incredible season for her.
The men’s pole vault is a fascinating competition but also somewhat flawed. The two questions to be asked about it are: how high will Mondo vault, and who will finish second? In the women’s, the question is more fundamental: Who will Win?
Katie Moon is the reigning Olympic champion and the 2022 world champion. However, when defending her world title in Budapest in 2023, Moon and Nina Kennedy could not be separated and were declared joint winners. The decision of the vaulters to share the spoils was heavily criticized in some quarters. Still, the athletes justified their decision that a jump-off in exhaustion would have been dangerous. Inevitably, Kennedy was asked about that in the press conference: “Budapest will go down in history as one of my favorite competitions. We both jumped so well, and I think after that night, Katie and I were both like, ‘if this happens in Paris, we won’t be sharing again.’”
Kennedy correctly stressed the mental aspect of the evening competition, saying, “The winner tonight was going to be the person who could handle the stress of the Olympics the best. It is such a mental event”. And she did it. It was a magnificent achievement for Katie Moon to win in Tokyo and Oregon, and then along came Kennedy to match her in Budapest and beat her in Paris. With another global title up for grabs in 2025 in Tokyo, the women’s pole vault continues to look really competitive.
