Summer Games 2024: Diving vs. Pole Vault

What goes up, must come down. Or what goes down must come up? Depends which way you look at it! For this event choose how you’d like to take-on gravity — by fighting it for the top spot, or following it to victory!

Diving

Diving was first introduced to the Olympics during 1904’s St. Louis games, where divers could either perform “plain” dives or “fancy” acrobatic dives.

The 1904 games also held a competition called “Plunge for Distance” in which an athlete dove from the side of a pool and then remained motionless underneath the water until they came to a stop. The one who floated the furtherest was declared the winner. Diver William Dickey is the only athlete to ever win gold in this competition as it was scrapped in subsequent years.

Since its debut diving has evolved a lot, with the addition of springboard dives, synchronized dives, and new dive types. Today there are over 85 platform dives and 60 springboard dives that can be performed!

For women’s Olympic diving the top performers are Wu Minxia with seven total metals including 5 golds, and Chen Ruolin who also has 5 golds. For men’s diving, Greg Louganis is ranked highest with 4 golds and 1 silver.

Pole Vault

Men’s pole vault has been present since the debut of the modern Olympics. But strangely, the women’s pole vault was not added to the Olympics until much later, in the year 2000, over a century since the first modern Olympic games were held!

Despite its long history, a surprisingly small amount of world records have been beaten during the Olympic games. Women’s pole vault just has one record-breaking pole vaulter – Yelena Isinbayeva, who set a world record in the 2004 games, and then again in the 2008 games, with a jump of 5.05 m (16 ft 6+3⁄4 in).

Men have also had only a handful of Olympic record breaks. Frank Foss cleared 4.09 m (13 ft 5 in) in 1920, and Władysław Kozakiewicz set a world record during the games in 1980 with a jump of 5.78 m (18 ft 11+1⁄2 in). Then just this year Swedish Olympian Armand “Mondo” Duplantis set a world record during the Paris Olympics, with an amazing jump of 6.25 m (20 ft 6 in), beating his own record-holding jump of 6.24 m (20 ft 5+1⁄2 in).

Improvements in the poles themselves have certainly also helped elevated the height achievements possible by Olympic athletes. Competitive vaulting poles started out as solid ash, then switched over to flexible bamboo, then aluminum, and are currently made of fiber glass or carbon fiber.

 

Hopefully you’re not afraid of heights, because both these competition require launching your body high into the air in hopes of that Olympic Gold! Fortunately during Eyewire’s Summer Games you’ll just have to launch yourself into a cube (or 50) to help your team get that winning badge! The competition starts at 11:00 AM ET on 8/26 and goes for 48 hours. Bonus information is detailed in your notifications.