The changing face of men’s Pole Vaulting

While women’s pole vaulting continues to scale new heights, with World and Area records aplenty each year, the trend in the older established discipline of men’s pole vaulting seems to be set in reverse gear.

Swedish Athletics statistician and journalist A. Lennart Julin lays out his definitive study into the emerging trends that are affecting the most dramatic of athletics events.

The standards of the women’s Pole Vault seem to still continue to rise. Something which is not that surprising as the event still has not even become a teenager as part of the international programme. Of course the same kind of pattern could not be expected for its much more venerable male counterpart. But haven’t the recent trends for the men’s Pole Vault actually been the opposite witnessing declining standards in the last few years?

The post-Bubka era

Or is it only that the stunning exploits for over a decade (from 1983 onwards) of Ukraine’s legendary Sergey Bubka have fooled us into believing that 6 metre vaults were more or less the norm in the “good old days”? Our impressionable minds are easy to trick into regarding one outstanding individual as giving a true representation of a whole era.

Luckily there is a simple way to prove or disprove all those hypotheses: Just find the statistical year lists and analyze them for whatever trends there might be. The IAAF website provides the necessary statistics as it begun to present year lists in 1998 meaning that the last six years are covered. Please notice that all these years belong to what could be called the post-Bubka era.

The first simple exercise is to just establish - year by year - which heights that have been needed to reach prominent positions in the world lists. This is how the numbers turned out:

1st: 6.01 - 6.05 - 6.03 - 6.05 - 5.90 - 5.95
5th: 5.93 - 5.95 - 5.90 - 5.86 - 5.85 - 5.87
10th: 5.85 - 5.85 - 5.85 - 5.85 - 5.76 - 5.81
25th: 5.76 - 5.70 - 5.73 - 5.75 - 5.70 - 5.70

The significant regress is immediately visible with especially the last two years lagging behind. This is further highlighted if one also looks at the number of athletes making various “barrier” heights:

6.00: 2 - 3 - 1 - 1- 0 - 0
5.90: 8 - 9 - 7 - 4 - 2 - 4
5.80: 23 - 17 - 19 - 18 - 9 - 12
5.70: 39 - 29 - 38 - 31 - 30 - 32

Thus the numbers of 6.00+, 5.90+ and 5.80+ vaulters have more or less been cut in half from the 1998-2000 period to 2002-2003. However, on the 5.70 level the regression is not that obvious, rather it is almost invisible.

Yet there is no stronger evidence of markedly falling standards than when we analyse the total number of performances (rather than performers) at the top heights, as here the reduction is by a factor of three or even more!:

6.00: 3 - 7 - 1 - 1 - 0 - 0
5.90: 21 - 32 - 13 - 9 - 3 - 6
5.80: 91 - **- 60 - 55 - 32 - 35

** data missing.

It is especially relevant to compare years in a similar position in the Olympic cycle, i.e. 1998 vs 2002 and 1999 vs 2003. - the number of 5.80 marks fell from 91 to 32 between 1998 and 2002 and the number of 5.90 marks from 32 to 6 between 1999 and 2003.

A generational problem

The drop could of course very easily be attributed to the changing careers of just a few athletes. For example when a hyper-consistent 5.80+ vaulter like Maksim Tarasov left the scene there was no one from the next generation around to fill the gap. The situation was further exaggerated when other “main contributors” like Jeff Hartwig, Jean Galfione and Tim Lobinger despite remaining in the “business” gradually fell off their top level of consistency.

There has been an insufficient influx of new talent to replace the always ongoing out-flux of “old” stars. Simply put, the world’s vaulting elite is getting older. Since 1998 the median age of the top-25 has progressed as follows: 25 - 25 - 26 - 26 - 27 - 27. I.e. the average world class vaulter is now two years older than in 1998!

Demise of the USA and the Soviet Union production line

Beyond this general “talent drought” the problems for the two major traditional producers of vaulting talent, the former Soviet Union and the USA, are also key to the decline.

After a fifteen year continuous flow of new Pole Vault talent, the Soviet production came to a halt during the political upheaval around 1990. The last generation of vaulters coming out of the old “system” was born in the mid-1970’s (Markov, Averbukh, Chistiakov, Strogalev, Smiryagin) and thus its members are now fast approaching their thirties.

If the Soviet regress has a very obvious reason, this is not the case with the recent US inability to develop fresh new world class pole vaulters. The old key factors - tradition, know-how, equipment and the collegiate system - are still there but for some reason or another the “output” is not at all up to the previous par.

The statistical consequences have become increasingly obvious: This summer the top US clearance was 5.81 and all the top four at the national championships were past their 30th birthdays. But most worrying is the fact that no immediate “solution” is visible as during the last two outdoor seasons only one single vaulter in “collegiate age” (22 or younger) managed to clear 5.60 or more.

Smaller pegs

But what about the recent changes to the Pole Vault rules - shorter pegs and semicircular end pieces for the crossbar? Couldn’t they be the real cause for the negative statistical patterns? When the changes were introduced there certainly came heated reactions from some leading vaulters. It was argued that the changes would alter the premises dramatically in a negative way. It was even suggested that the expected “loss” could be as large as 30 centimetres!

It was therefore claimed that any comparison with old marks would be so unfair that it was necessary to give the event a fresh start statistically by scrapping all old records.

There is, however, one major problem with blaming the new rules: The change came in 2003 and the major drop took place already in 2002! Actually if one compares 2003 to 2002 there has rather been a slight statistical improvement under the new rules!

This fact is underlined if one brings the analysis down to the individual level: The top-10 athletes of the 2003 world list had a median improvement of 9.5 cm over their respective personal 2002 marks, while the corresponding number for 2002 versus 2001 was just 4.0cm, and for 2001 versus 2000 an even lower 3.0cm!

If you look at it from the opposite point of view (i.e. measure what happened to the top-10 of year X in the year X+1) the pattern is similar. The median drop of 8.5 cm from 2002 to 2003 is significantly smaller than the two previous years when it was 15 cm (2001-2002) and 10 cm (2000-2001). i.e. the numbers clearly show that the true “loss” took place one year before the new rules came into force - the numbers even seem to indicate a slight positive effect from the change!

Truly clearing the bar

If one looks objectively on the nature of the rule changes it is not the least surprising that they did not turn out to have any discernible effect on the statistics.

It is only those vaults where the athlete hits the bar really hard so that it either rotates up into the air (when the design of the end pieces might matter) or is pushed at least some 3 centimetres forward (when the length of the pegs will matter). But even in those instances it took a considerable amount of luck for the bar to stay up already under the old rules.

And those claiming that the new rules made it impossible for future vaulters to challenge Sergey Bubka’s world records must obviously never have seen “vintage Bubka” performing. His World records were true clearances, where he often sailed so high above the bar that the general opinion of the time was that he could have cleared 6.20-6.25 if the bar had been set at such a height.

It could here also be appropriate to quote from the IAAF Handbook Rule 183.10 (a paragraph that has been there in some form since the birth of the event!): “The crossbar shall rest on pegs so that if it is touched by a competitor or his pole, it will fall easily to the ground in the direction of the landing area.”

Actually the whole idea of both the Pole Vault and the High Jump has always been to that the athlete shall CLEAR the bar, i.e. the bar is there to provide physical proof that the athlete did manage to get at least that high up into the air. An athlete who depresses the bar or hits it hard has obviously not reached a sufficient height and then the bar shall fall - “easily” - to the ground!

It could also be worth pointing out that when the High Jump faced a similar problem (athletes keeping a depressed bar from falling by pushing it towards the uprights) already in the 1920’s the supports were changed from a design similar to the one used in the Pole Vault to the current one using two flat supports pointing towards each other.