Pressure to Look the Part

By Leah Deforest Granger

Pole vault is the relationship between your body, your pole, and the runway in front of you. One jump takes less than ten seconds. In that time, you have to get down the runway, bend the pole, and clear the bar. If asked what goes into my vault, I would say speed, strength, and technique. There is a focus on control in each aspect of the vault to optimize your jump. As a woman in pole vault, I feel pressured by the weight number on my pole, the strength of my body, and the perception of my audience.

On each pole there is a weight number. This number represents the weight that pole was manufactured to support. The number is there to show each vaulter what poles are built to support their weight. While the weighting of poles is clearly done to prevent injury, it can put pressure on vaulters to be a certain weight.

As for the performance of a pole vaulter, we work hard to be fast and strong. The quicker you are at takeoff, the less work you have to do in the air to clear the same bar. The stronger you are, the bigger the pole you can bend to propel you in the air.

Luckily, the strength needed to pole vault keeps away some of the desire for athletes to be thin that exists in distance running. That being said, the individual, spotlight nature of the sport can instill fear of the critical eye from the self and others. While the ideal body type may not be thin, there is a perception that the best performers do not have much more than muscle.

The sheer difficulty of vaulting physically prevents many body types from approaching the sport. Since pole vault is not well-known, we look to the professionals to get a sense of what high level vaulting looks like. When we look at the top women pole vaulters, they have a sinewy body type. As professionals balance the strength to weight ratio, they carry the heavy burden of the eye of media.

Unlike the tank tops and long shorts that men wear, the women’s uniforms are bikini bottoms and bras. British Olympic bronze medalist Holly Bradshaw caught the attention of media when she refused to wear the distributed uniform and had a less revealing outfit custom made. Holly claimed (September 27, 2021; Instagram) the scandalous outfits are turning women away from competing in the sport.

Pole vault is not the only sport at the Olympic games to gain attention for sexualizing women. The German women’s gymnastics team wore long pant unitards instead of the standard bikini cut leotards to show their condemnation of the sexualization gymnasts face. The outfits that professional women’s sports teams are given are not designed by or for them.

Pole vaulters have a reputation for being the goofballs on track teams. The values of vaulters tend to stem from the fact that flying brings us joy! Vaulters are accepting before they are competitive. These values do not align with the exclusive nature of feeling limited by the pressure to expose skin. While pole vault is a difficult sport, body type and ability are not directly correlated. To be strong and fast is not at all to be skinny. We have all seen a range of heights, weights, and ages succeed at the sport.

In order to keep pole vault the approachable sport that it can be, we need to be aware of how it makes athletes feel to be watched on the runway. As someone who has felt pressure to look a certain way, I have felt lucky to be a part of teams who remind us why we do this sport with fun costume meets, and teams who work actively to be body positive in a sport that is not always so.