VaultCats

Without this lady the women’s pole vault would have struggled to be what it is today. I was fortunate to spend a week with her at the Olympic Training center and get to know her as a first class young lady. She is one all young girl vaulters should know about.

A foster kid with asthma isn't supposed to end up flying over a bar held fifteen feet in the air. But nobody told that to the girl from Auburn, California.

She gave up gymnastics as a child because her lungs wouldn't let her keep it. That should have been the end of a story before it started — a kid pulled off the mat, told to find something gentler. Instead she found volleyball, then hurdles, then jumps, running the track at Placer High School like she had something to prove to nobody but herself. She wasn't a prodigy. She placed second in a race here, didn't place at all in a race there. She was good — not yet great, not yet anything the record books would remember.

Then, at Idaho State University, a coach who used to vault himself handed her a pole.

There is a particular kind of loneliness in doing something almost nobody else is doing. In the mid-1990s, women's pole vault barely existed as a sport with rules, records, or respect. Dragila wasn't just learning a new event — she was helping invent it, one of a handful of women worldwide sanctioned to even attempt it. There was no lineage to lean on. No footage to study of women who'd done it before her, because almost none had.

She won the women's pole vault at the 1996 U.S. Olympic Trials.

It was a demonstration event. It didn't count. The Atlanta Olympics that summer had no place on the program for what she did — she could win, and still the biggest stage in the world would look past her like she wasn't there.

That kind of thing could end a career quietly. It didn't end hers.

Three years later, in March 1997, she stood in an arena and cleared 4.48 metres, a new indoor world record, and something shifted — not in the crowd, not yet, but in her. Weeks later she scored 6,999 points in a women's decathlon in Los Angeles, an American record in an event most people didn't know existed for women at all. She was collecting firsts the way other athletes collect medals.

In 1999, at the Outdoor World Championships, she won gold and broke the outdoor world record too, clearing 4.60 metres. She would go on to set or tie the world record eighteen times across her career — eight indoors, ten outdoors — rewriting the ceiling of her own sport again and again, sometimes against no one but the bar itself.

She never stopped chasing the moment the sport had denied her once.

In 2000, she won the U.S. Olympic Trials again, pushed the world record to 4.63 metres, and arrived in Sydney where women's pole vault finally had a place on the Olympic program. She won it. The first gold medal ever awarded in women's Olympic pole vault belongs to her name, permanently, because there was no one before her to have won it instead.

She kept vaulting long after most careers end. At 37, she cleared 4.70 metres. At 38, in 2009, a 4.55-metre jump became a Masters World Record that stood for the better part of a decade. That same year she walked into her final World Championships and didn't make the final. She was 38 years old, competing against women half her age, in an event she had helped will into existence — and she was still there, still trying, when so many would have already gone home with their medals framed on a wall.

That's not decline. That's devotion.

She married, divorced, married again, raised a daughter, and built a life in Boise where she now coaches the next generation at her own vault facility — passing forward the exact thing that once had nowhere to land for her. In 2014, the National Track and Field Hall of Fame made it official. Every year, young vaulters compete at the Stacy Dragila Open at Idaho State, chasing bars she once had to fight just to be allowed to jump toward.

She didn't inherit a sport. She built the runway for every woman who vaults after her.

Don't let her name fade into a footnote of "first." She earned every bar she ever cleared.

Summer National Championships results have been posted!!! You can find them on Athletic.net, Milesplit (linked shortly), our website under the Previous Meet Results, and USATF.

Thank you again to all who came and THANK YOU TO OUR AWESOME SPONSORS!!!

https://www.community-news.com/stories/aledos-hardison-wins-national-pole-vault-title,176782?
Appreciate The Community News for covering the Aledo kids.

Aledo's Hardison wins national pole vault title - The Community News Aledo High School's pole vault history is renowned, with the program sending vaulters to the state track meet on almost an annual basis. Now they can add a national champion to their resume'. …

When the NCAA added a new rule of 5 years to get 5 years of eligibility in, they didn’t include people who finished last year. Court says they now have to. Just happened this week, so if their team has a roster spot for them they can now play this year. Going to be tough on fall sports.