[OC] Men’s Pole Vault World Record Progression

10 comments

1. Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_pole_vault_world_record_progression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_pole_vault_world_record_progression)
   Tool: Pandas (Python)

2. really curious what lead to that back-trough after 2000 …

3. This made me wonder when the modern fiberglass pole was introduced to the sport.

   Sure enough, it’s pretty obvious from the diagram.

4. I don’t know a lot about the sport, but have read that a the jumps and plateaus on the graph have a lot to do with various technological advancements:

   * **Poles:** wooden to bamboo to metal to fiberglass
   * **Landing pads:** none to sawdust to foam

   Edit: found the article: [https://business.uoregon.edu/news/pole-vault-world-records](https://business.uoregon.edu/news/pole-vault-world-records)

5. For those curios the current women’s wr is 5.06m set by Yelena Isinbayeva from Russia

6. Can someone calculate when we see 50m ?

7. So the gains are mostly determined by the rules or technology used ?

8. I suppose we are to understand that the colors, when broken-up, are no longer for the same person?

   This seems like it could be confusing if two people ever went back-and-forth with one another, or if anyone ever set a WR non-consecutively.

   I’m not sure what could be used more cleanly, just an observation about a potential improvement to this very nice looking graph.

9. This is an example of a chart that should have the Y-axis baseline of Zero.

   Edit: in fact, what is the first data point? 3.0 or ~3.2? A bit weird how it’s got white gap between the axis and data.

10. Duplantis is an absolute beast.