July 11 2009
What is Pole Vault?

Well, Pole Vault is the “maddes” event in athletics. More properly speaking, Pole Vault is "an athletic field event in which a person uses a long, flexible pole (which today is usually made either of fiberglass or carbon fiber) as an aid to leap over a bar." Yes, you could have fund that on Wikipedia, so what I can tell you here is that Pole Vault is also one of the most technical and difficult events in track and field.
Pole Vault is one of the four jumping events in track and field. Each athlete chooses what height they want to enter the competition. Once they enter, they have three attempts to clear the height. If a height is cleared, the vaulter advances to the next height, where they will have three more attempts. Once the vaulter has three consecutive misses, they are out of the competition and the highest height they cleared is their result. A "no height", often denoted "NH", refers to the failure of a vaulter to clear any bar during the competition.

Once the vaulter enters the competition, they can choose to pass heights. If a vaulter achieves a miss on their first attempt at a height, they can pass to the next height, but they will only have two attempts at that height, as they will be out once they achieve three consecutive misses. Similarly, after earning two misses at a height, they could pass to the next height where they would have only one attempt.
The competitor who clears the highest height is the winner.
Competitive pole vaulting began using solid ash poles, bamboo poles, tubular aluminum, and eventually fiberglass. As in the High Jump, the landing area was originally a heap of sawdust or sand where athletes landed on their feet. As technology enabled higher vaults, mats evolved into bags of large chunks of foam. Today's high tech mats are foam usually 1-1.5 meters thick.

As you will also see on Wikipedia, pole jumping competitions were known to the ancient Greeks, Cretans and Celts - whoever those guys were. In St Lucia, you might be surprised to know that people have been doing Pole Vault for 50 years or so. Although he did not learn the event whilst he lived here, Dominic Johnson (5.55m) holds the St Lucia National Record.
We'll talk more about Dominic some other time (or Google him) but you should know that for the past couple of years, St Lucia has had a Pole Vault programme in place that resulted in two CARIFTA medals this year, including the gold. But St Lucia's young vaulters still have a long way to go in an event where athletes spend years understanding and perfecting technique.