When something goes wrong with a vaulter, a certain silence falls over a track meet. The run-up, the plant, and the snap of the pole bending are all audible to everyone. The body then began to move through the air. And occasionally, something else happens in place of the well-known thump of foam absorbing a landing. a more robust sound. The kind that forces coaches to begin walking before they have made up their minds to do so.
When first-year vaulter Rohan Thota hit the ground next to the pit rather than in it in February, Grinnell College experienced something similar. A personal record had just been cleared by him. He claimed to be tired and not paying attention to his body. He didn’t bring enough speed into the plant on his last try of the day, and the pole sent him backward rather than forward. He fell to his knees. His right forearm broke both of its bones. He suffered an ACL tear. He finished the season on the infield.
Grinnell completely halted its pole vaulting program in a matter of days. And in the weeks that have passed, a quiet but tenacious debate about whether universities, high schools, and regulatory bodies have sufficiently taken the risks associated with the sport has spread far beyond Iowa.
At least one research team has declared pole vaulting to be the riskiest activity among all the sports they examined. Although the numbers are small, they are unyielding. One vaulter has died every year on average over the last 20 years. A 2001 study published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine examined 32 catastrophic injuries and discovered that 19% of them resulted in permanent disability and half of them caused death. When their teen enrolls in track, most parents are unaware of those kinds of statistics.
It’s not just the injury that makes the Grinnell case unique. It’s the small group of people who are now implying that the warning signs were apparent even before Thota ran down the runway on that particular day. Senior vaulter Luca Fornari claims he voiced concerns about the coaching to the athletic department but received little response. Fornari essentially rebuilt the program from scratch after an earlier injury shut it down. According to Thota, he was “moving up holds”—using a higher grip on the pole, which results in higher jumps—but his form was not keeping up with his ambition. That same session, Fornari saw him land several times on the ground rather than the pit. Between attempts, nothing changed.
It’s difficult not to wonder how frequently the same pattern occurs at smaller programs across the nation, where head coaches manage several events and specialized pole vault knowledge is uncommon. Pole vaulting is completely prohibited in Iowa high schools, according to Melvin Barney, an engineer-turned-coach who joined Grinnell’s staff last year. That’s the kind of information that ought to be more well-known than it is.
After several deaths in 2002, the helmet debate erupted, but it never really progressed. The majority of vaulters still reject them, claiming that the current designs are intended for skateboarders rather than athletes plunging from a second-story window. Lawrence Johnson, a silver medallist in the 2000 Olympics, once claimed that helmets could “throw off your balance.” That’s still the general consensus in the sport twenty years later.
The way vaulters defend their event has an almost lovely quality. Thota described it as a test of mental and physical prowess “like no other.” It was elegant, according to Barney. Neither of them makes the case for banning the sport. They make the case for improved coaching, greater candor regarding exhaustion, and greater readiness to prevent an athlete from making one more leap.
It’s still unclear if anyone outside the vaulting community is open to listening.
