American pole vaulter overcame multiple challenges to win gold in Tokyo this year

Katie Nageotte can look back on 2021 with pride as the year that she became Olympic champion but the journey to the podium was anything but smooth.

First of all there was Covid and its lingering symptoms. Then her poles got broken. Finally, food poisoning two weeks before leaving for Tokyo.

Yet from mid-May to the Games in Tokyo her record she enjoyed five wins out of five. This sequence of wins started with 4.93m at the Dwight Phillips Invite in Marietta, followed by winning the US Olympic Trials with a PB of 4.95m and a 4.90m at the Herculis in Monaco. The 4.93m was the first time she had used her new ESSX poles in a competition too.

In Tokyo she cleared 4.55m first attempt in the qualifying, which proved to be enough to make the final. Because of the heavy rain, the officials decided to cut short the qualifying competition with 15 progressing rather than the usual 12. It was not without drama with Sandi Morris, Nageotte’s friend and US team-mate, being hurt and not making the final.

As Nageotte warmed up for the final three days later the quad in her take-off leg was so tight that it kept grabbing. “I was getting a little nervous but I figured that it would go away in the pole vault warm up, but it still kept grabbing,” she says.

“My warm-up is very intentional, trying to get to the biggest and stiffest pole in warm-up, because that tells me where my starting mark is and my standard placement. I was getting a little nervous, because as much as I’m confident in what I’m capable of, I am only as good as my body allows me to be.

“I was feeling that if I jumped off that leg, the quad would just tear.”

The opening height was 4.50m and Nageotte failed with her first two attempts. At least she understood what was happening, as she explains: “With the first couple of jumps the quad did loosen up but in a sense my first couple of jumps were what the warm-up should have been.

“Needing three attempts on the opening bar was very nerve-wracking and not something I never want to do again.”

She added: “It was not the game plan but it seemed a perfect representation of my year – training well and then Covid, training well and then the poles break…”

She cleared 4.70m on her second attempt followed by 4.80m and 4.85m on her first attempt by which stage there were only four athletes left – but Nageotte was in third place because of her earlier failures.

“When I cleared 4.80m,” she continues, “that was the moment when I really felt myself again. I felt that I had connected with my jump in a way that was more normal for me. Even at 4.70m I was still figuring out things I would normally have done in warm up.

“Now I felt excited and wanted to get back on the runway and do it again.  The same with 4.90m, my first attempt missed but it was really close. So I was wanting to get back on the runway and try it again immediately but make it a little bit better.

“What is funny is that when I took the second attempt of 4.90m, the one that I cleared, when I took off, my first thought was that I had messed it up but I committed to it and cleared it.”

She tells me Olympic champion “is everything”, adding: “The biggest dream that I’ve ever had as an athlete. The biggest goal that I never set for myself.  Alongside breaking the world or American record, being Olympic champion is about as good as it gets.”

What’s more, an interesting dimension of the Olympic final was competing against, close friend, Holly Bradshaw. “Once I knew that both of us were on the podium, I actually walked up to her and said ‘we did it’,” Nageotte remembers.

“Holly said ‘it’s not over yet’ but I think in that moment just knowing we were both in the medals – and having found my jump again – just enabled me to relax and have fun. I had sometimes said that in my dream world we would both be up there.

“Earlier, when we’d finished warm-ups and we’re going to have to wait a bit, Holly walked over and said ‘do you want to sit at the back of the runway and chat?’ I said, ‘yes that will be great and keep us at ease’. Obviously in an Olympic final there is not as much of the chit chat because we very much stay in our lanes and stay focused. Holly had a great day and I was so, so happy for her.”