Fiberglass vaulting poles were old news when they made headlines in 1962
American newspapers made a fuss over fiberglass vaulting poles in the early 1960s, after John Uelses set a world best with one in February 1962. Yet Herb Jenks had been making them since 1948, and Bob Mathias carried one when he won the Olympic decathlon in 1952.
Pole materials changed repeatedly. Early vaulters used ash or hickory, bamboo arrived in 1904, and aluminium and steel followed after 1945. In February 1963, UCLA's C. K. Yang and two other vaulters each surpassed the existing world mark within nine days, all on fiberglass. James Monroe Lindler of South Carolina's Columbia Products Company applied in 1967 to patent a hollow pole with a spiral winding, granted in 1970. Resin-soaked glass-fibre tape is wound around a metal tube called a mandrel, baked, cooled, and the tube pulled out, a method adapted from a 1954 patent for fibreglass golf clubs.
Jumping with poles is ancient. Egyptian engravings and artefacts from around 2500 BC show spears used to scale enemy walls and cross irrigation ditches, and Greek pottery shows poles used to leap onto or over things. Ireland's Tailteann Games probably featured something similar between about 1800 and 550 BC, though perhaps for distance, since farmers there vaulted canals and rivers.
Height-based competition dates to the 1790s, when a German schoolteacher, Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths, often called the father of the modern event, set out uprights, run-up length, grip and technique. The sport spread from Germany to Britain and the United States. England's earliest known measured contest was held in 1843 at the Ulverston Football and Cricket Club in Lancashire. It has been an Olympic medal event for men since the first modern Games in 1896, and for women since 2000.
Athletics counts it among four major jumps, with the triple, long and high jumps, and it is unusual for needing specialised gear even at beginner level. Modern poles are generally fiberglass or carbon fiber. Speed, agility, strength and technique all matter, which may explain why several elite vaulters, including world-record setters Yelena Isinbayeva and Brian Sternberg, trained first as gymnasts.
Source: Pole vault
