3183: Pole Vault Pole

Pole Vault Pole

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Title text: My goal in life is to be personally responsible for at least one sports rule change.

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Explanation

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Discussion

Climbing up the pole is already forbidden as a direct result of people actually doing that with a normal pole; specifically neither hand may hold the pole above the initial position of the upper hand. The other two methods are excluded by the rule that the bottom end of the pole must be within the box during the jump, so Randall will have to think of something else to reach his goal. 79.141.154.179 08:16, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

• The first is a good point, but I actually couldn't find a rule that the pole must remain within the box, just that it can only touch the landing mat after being properly planted. 96.237.242.213 15:30, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

On a related point of interest, there are lots of occasions, particularly in more equipment orientated sports such as cycling and rowing where technical Innovations allowed a competitor to dominate and were banned immediately afterwards. Usually these aren't as colourful as Randall's proposals but the superman position bike frame, sliding rigger rowing boat and LZR "super suit for swimming all enabled new records and were deemed "tech doping" afterwards.

Most records set with these have since been broken but it's still thought they would confer a significant advantage.

Time limit is mentioned in both pole vault wikipedia page and IAAF regulations, but couldn't find any good link to just link to only time limit directly.^{[citation needed]}--Trimutius (talk) 13:54, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

More like DebunkXKCD. 209.52.88.66 17:01, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

someone should add this to the fun fact category, I dont want to screw it upQwertyuiopfromdefly (talk) 07:02, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

Also, there may be less need of a rule change, because, except for solution 1,

None of these work in a 3D world. A pole with snall diameter can be approximated to have measure 0 in a 3D world. In other words, the challenge of a pole vault lies therein to accomblish a task with a n-2 dimensional device in a world with n dimensions. I believe a rule specification like this should avoid any workarounds in the general case. 2a00:20:c004:5ba1:5b08:2dd2:9775:4d05 (talk) 14:37, 21 December 2025 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
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[At top left: A large wheel whose diameter is more than 4 times Cueball's height. Cueball is at the top, running backwards so that the wheel will roll towards a pole vaulting crossbar at the same height.]

[At top right: A long pole is bent into an arch going over a very high pole vaulting crossbar. Cueball is climbing up the left part, and is about 3/4 of the way to the top.

[Along the bottom: A long pole has been bent into a circle, with the ends tied together. It's rolling left-to-right towards a very high poll vaulting crossbar, and three positions are shown. On the left Cueball is running to catch up with it. In the middle he has jumped and caught the left part of he pole. On the right, he has let go and is thrown into the air towards the crossbar.

[Caption below diagrams:]

Fun fact: There are no limits on the length or diameter of the pole in pole vault.