PoleVaultPower.com

Look at this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3uiITw6QMw it is from the European championship for teams 2010.

The interesting vaulter is Matti Mononen from Finland. His first attempt comes after 4 min and 54 sec on 5.25 meter. Next attempt is after 5min48sec before he goes far above at 6min25sec. Next hight is 5.40 meter it comes after 8min28sec.

It is clear that Mononen was "of" that day. Should someone have interfered?

My personal opinion is that at the elite level athletes should be allowed to make their own decision. I support limiting the standard placement and basic pit safety, but I don't think officials should interfere. Hopefully an athlete's coach would advise them to not kill themselves, but often elites are competing without their coach.

At the high school level I would love to see more ability to interfere if a kid is vaulting dangerously.

My personal opinion is that at the elite level athletes should be allowed to make their own decision.

I totally agree, however I think this video very well illustrate a classic problem (most often seen in high school etc). Vaulters that have problems all through the competition.

atlegu wrote:

My personal opinion is that at the elite level athletes should be allowed to make their own decision.

I totally agree, however I think this video very well illustrate a classic problem (most often seen in high school etc). Vaulters that have problems all through the competition.

Why this may be simi-true. What would you recommend the officials do? The vaulter did not have standards closer than 40 because that is rules. If he makes the bar at 40 he lands on pit. So official could say your pole is too big and requires him to go down, well the vaulter moves down and blows through the pole then misses the height and can blame it on the official. And it was obvious he could use that as he did jump that one bar by quite a bit.

The biggest thing I see is that the vaulter had such little ability at telling where he was in the air and letting go so close over the box.

It is also one of those things that is sometimes a hard decision for a coach. Say you have a vaulter that always uses a 16' 190. And warming up at the meet they start blowing through that pole really bad and it is obvious they are going to knock off every bar with standards at 80. So athlete moves up to 16' 195 and gets stood up like this guy in the video. Well warm ups are over and it is time to put up the bar. What do you tell the vaulter? You know he will not make bar using the smaller pole unless they run slower, and no one wants to tell a vaulter to run slower because they might run too slow and get rejected. So you can pretty much be like use the smaller pole and blow through or haul it down the runway and use the bigger pole.

It is somewhat a responsibility of the athlete to have to be able to know how they feel when they leave the ground or are on the runway.

You should start on the smaller pole. You can always go up after the first attempt if the vaulter blows through, and they should have more confidence at that point. If you start on too big a pole you now have to go down, or worse the athlete can get hurt.

First

The vaulter did not have standards closer than 40 because that is rules

Wrong, It is an US only rule.

The IAAF-rules says (Rule 183) " Athletes may have the crossbar moved only in the direction of the landing area so that the edge of the crossbar nearest the athlete can be positioned at any point from that directly above the back end of the box to a point 80cm in the direction of the landing area".

This is the rule that is followed also for kids, high school and college all over Europe (as far as I know).

Second: There are usually no collar around the box (I have never seen any in Scandinavia other than the one I brought from US to Norway).

So it is definitively some differences. This is a picture of a typical box in Scandinavia: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150346044512000&set=o.257469904291820&type=1&theater

My point with the video was to illustrate a problem, most often seen for college kids, however clearly also a problem for some elite vaulters.