Yelena Isinbayeva in Paris (© Getty Images)
The duel of the night at the ‘Golden Gala Kinder+Sport’ meeting this Friday (13 July 2007) in Rome, Italy, the third stage of the IAAF Golden League 2007, looks set to be the pole vaulting contest between Russia’s Yelena Isinbayeva and USA’s Jennifer Stuczynski.
A 4.91m world season’s lead and a meeting record in Paris last Friday (6 July) by the World, Olympic and European record holder put a smile back on the face of the Russian who only the previous week had been crying with frustration at ‘only’ winning at the IAAF World Athletics Tour meet in Ostrava with a best of 4.66m.
Until last Friday, Isinbayeva, the World record holder, had been competing this outdoor season in the strange, perhaps even slightly unnerving position of not being the season’s number one vaulter.
The event’s summit had until then been occupied by USA’s Jennifer Stuczynski, with her 4.88 Area record on 2 June.
In the Italian capital, the two women will face each other in competition for the first time since the 25-year-old US champion’s outdoor global breakthrough this year. They last met at the Millrose Games on 2 February with a 4.82m to 4.53 victory going to Isinbayeva.
Stuczynski, who was also 2006 American champion, ended last year with a personal best of 4.66 outdoors and 4.68 indoors. The latter mark she improved to 4.70 (19 Jan) and then 4.72 (9 Feb) this winter, and so a similar uplift in standard outdoors was expected, what perhaps was not was the scale of Stuczynski’s vault into the world all-time list.
Starting the summer with a 4.73m PB (21 April), Stuczynski set the Area record at 4.84m in Carson on 20 May, before soaring to 4.88 on her third try at the IAAF World Athletics Tour meet in New York on 2 June. Such was the new confidence of Stuczynski, who incidentally ended the 2006 summer with the disappointment of a no height at the World Cup in Athens - a title won by guess who?! - that she even gave a potential World record of 5.03m three, ultimately unsuccessful, tries too.
To put the 4.88 into context that makes the former basketball player who emerged on the scene in 2005 to win the USATF Indoor title, the equal second best women’s pole vaulter of all-time with former World record holder Svetlana Feofanova.
So while still way below the 5.01m lofty World record height of Isinbayeva, Stuczynski is a potent and more especially an in form threat to the Russian’s surpremacy.
So what does the World record holder think about the new challenge?
“I always try to do my best in every competition and know that if I do no one will beat me,” confirmed Isinbayeva in Paris last week. “But it’s good that Jen (Stuczynski) jumped 4.88 because that motivated me, that got me angry. It’s given me a challenge.”
“It’s been the motivation and anger which has been missing in my jumping.”
“I love to win of course but when you win every time you lose your appetite. It’s like someone who loves to eat chocolate and eats it every day and eventually you have so much that you hate it.”
“I now have got that hunger again. I am hungry to compete with her (Stuczynski).”
Chris Turner for the IAAF
