Nina Kennedy: Australia’s golden girl of the pole vault

Nina Kennedy, from Busselton, Western Australia, triumphed in a brutally long, and competitive women’s pole vault event at the Paris 2024 Olympics, finishing just one centimetre short of her personal best.

The women’s pole vault final was a strange affair to start, with 20 competitors making it following a bizarre qualification round in which too few competitors made the initial qualifying height of 4.70m.

Kennedy comfortably made her first jump, at the low height of 4.40m, before making light work of the 4.60m jump, per Kieran Pender for The Guardian.

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The Aussie faltered at 4.70m, needing two attempts to clear a height she is more than comfortable with. For a while, it seemed that mistake could prove costly, but she redeemed herself by clearing 4.80m on her first attempt.

With competitors falling around her, Kennedy continued to impress, cruising over 4.85m, alongside Alysha Newman from Canada, and Kennedy’s long-term rival Katie Moon from the USA.

4.90m proved too much for Newman, with Moon passing on the height to raise the stakes on the Canadian. Kennedy made it with her first jump, telling reporters, “I knew first-attempt clearances at those high bars were going to take the gold, I put all my focus into that exact second.”

With Moon passing on 4.90m, the bar was raised another 5cm. The American faltered at her two attempts, sending the gold medal down under, with Kennedy becoming an Olympic champion and making the Paris 2024 Games the most successful in Australian Olympic history, per BBC Sport.

Katie Moon and Nina Kennedy have shared more than just intense battles in the past, with the pair sharing the gold medal at the 2023 World Championships. That moment spurred Kennedy on, with the Australian saying, “Sharing with Katie will go down in history as one of my favorite competitions ever, but it really just ignited this self-belief in me,” per the Team USA website.

Despite the great sportswomanship on display last year, Kennedy wasn’t thinking about splitting gold this time, telling reporters after her win, “Deep down I knew I wasn’t going to [split gold], I wanted that outright gold medal.”

Kennedy is now an Olympic champion and a name known to many in both Australia and the US, but where did she come from, and how did she end up becoming the best women’s pole vaulter in the world? Let’s take a look.

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Kennedy was born in Busselton, Western Australia and was pole vaulting from the age of 11, per the Australian Olympic Committee.

From an early age, her talent was obvious, finishing second in the senior national competition aged just 14. An IAAF World Youth fifth-placed finish followed just a year later.

2015 saw Kennedy reach the senior World Championships for the first time, where she failed to reach the qualification height. Three years later, the Australian won Commonwealth bronze.

“I kind of always wanted to go to the Olympics in something,” Kennedy told ESPN earlier this year, and in 2021, despite an injury, her dream was realised, competing at the Tokyo Games.

A bronze at the 2022 World Athletics Championships, Kennedy won another bronze, before finally breaking her international hoodoo and winning gold in 2023, which she shared with Katie Moon.

Kennedy wasn’t shy about her ambitions in Paris, saying, “I became really confident in talking to the media, it was really scary, really vulnerable, to lay it all out there and say: “I want the f***** outright gold medal, this is what I want.” That’s really scary – I’m just really happy I got the job done.”

For Kennedy, the 7th August 2024 will live in her memory forever, and will remain in the annals of Australian Olympic history in perpetuity, she has become a national and Olympic great in one evening.

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