The gap between male and female vaulters

[vault3rb0y]

Is it closing?

Years ago I heard people saying that generally, at any level, there was an approximate 4 foot gap between male and female vaulters. The Male WR is about 20', the womens is about 16'. Auto-qualifying standards for Men at NCAA's is 18', for women it is 14'.

But it recent years (5-10), do you feel that the level of competition among women has risen? I feel like it's a lot more common to see 13' vaulters on the women's side in college than 17' on the men's. Now obviously men have been vaulting for longer than women, and it's only natural to see womenfolk's heights to continue to rise because of this (I remember when 15' was a HUGE deal at the Olympic level.) This is just anecdotal, but I wish we could do a statistical regression to compare hieghts for men and women in the past several years.

Does anyone else feel this may be true? Have any other thoughts?

[rainbowgirl28]

At the higher levels, the difference between men and women is somewhere around a meter, maybe a meter and some change.

[VaultPurple]

It is closing because there are a lot more women pole vaulters now, for the next few years or decades, women will get closer but never catch men. Just like in other sports like running events and swimming, where some of the top women can drop some times that would beat a lot of very good guys on the high school and college level, but still is a bit off from the very top guys.

The same way u can see a women run in the mid 10.ss and that would do very well on a whole lot of men's teams. There will be a women to jump 17 foot.. maybe even 18 eventually. Would be a lot sooner if you could get that 10.6 or 24 foot long jumping girl to put a pole in her hand.

But hopefully we will see a 21' guy too!

[achtungpv]

The same way u can see a women run in the mid 10.ss and that would do very well on a whole lot of men's teams. There will be a women to jump 17 foot.. maybe even 18 eventually. Would be a lot sooner if you could get that 10.6 or 24 foot long jumping girl to put a pole in her hand.

If Jackie Joyner Kersee was a vaulter, she'd hand Isi her a** in a brown paper bag. Unfortunately in the women's vault, we haven't seen athletes even in the same ballpark of the upper end of raw athletic ability like her yet.

[High on Vault]

I have heard from one of my coach that when vaulting started for girls in high school over 10 years ago they had to compete with the boys, and it was still thought that vaulting for a girl would mess up their internal orgrans. Its cool to me how this mind set has progressed to a close hieght comparison.

[VaultPurple]

In college right now there are 38 guys over 17' (5.20m), but only 17 over 13'6. The 38th girl in the nation is jumping 4.00m. So I guess in college right now it is more like a 4 foot difference. There is also a 1.22m difference in first place male and first place female.

And on the world standing. The number one guy is 5.80m and number one girl is 4.60m, putting them at 1.20m apart.

But indoor on the world standing the number one guy jumped 6.03m and the number one girl jumped 4.86m which puts them at 1.17m apart.

However when you look at world records there is only a 1.09m difference between Isinbaeva and Bubka which is a 3'7 difference.

And if you want to compare world records in other events.. The men's world record in the 100m has an average speed that produces enough energy to have about a 1.19m difference from the energy produced from the average speed in the women's 100m dash world record. But in my opinion both sexes are underachieving, because there are guys fast enough to run well over 10m/s down the runway, and there are women out there capable of running over 9m/s down the runway.... Just have to get them to pole vault, or have the guys vaulting focus more on running faster with the pole to hit those high speeds.