POWERFUL LA NINA EFFECT
FROM career rock bottom to the top of the Commonwealth in 12 months.
That’s the wild ride Nina Kennedy has gone on, with the Western Australian pole vaulter winning her first major championships gold medal in emphatic fashion.
It took her just three clearances to claim the title with a clearance of 4.60m as her opponents faltered.
She then took the bar to a Commonwealth Games record of 4.76m but was thwarted by a series of wind gusts which swept through Alexander Stadium.
Kennedy didn’t get out of qualifying at the Tokyo Olympics last year but has turned her career around with a world championships bronze medal two weeks ago and now a Commonwealth Games gold medal.
“It’s incredible, just from Tokyo this time last year I was at the bottom of my whole career,” Kennedy said.
“To come third in the whole world and first in the Commonwealth is incredible. I was mentally quite flat after the worlds. I had done such a great job there and then to come here and repeat such a big effort was hard so I’m really proud of myself.”
The last Australian to win the women’s pole vault was Alana Boyd at the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games.
Kennedy, who won the bronze medal on the Gold Coast in 2018 with a clearance of 4.60m, opened at 4.35m and easily cleared it and by the time the bar went to 4.45m, there were only five left in the competition.
She then tactically passed on 4.50m, which the rest of her competitors failed to get over, meaning she was guaranteed a shared gold medal at the least.
Kennedy then raised the bar to 4.60m but added some drama by running through on her first attempt. She easily cleared it on her second attempt to claim the title.
There was carnage behind Kennedy, with defending champion Canada’s Alysha Newman retiring midway through the competition after running through at 4.35m.
Earlier England’s Olympic bronze medallist Holly Bradshaw was a late out from the final after not getting through the warm-up because of a hamstring injury suffered at the world championships.
Kennedy hasn’t taken the conventional route to Commonwealth glory, with plenty of missteps in recent years following injury, mental demons and Covid.
After getting on the dais on the Gold Coast in 2018, she started to struggle with a spate of injuries which wore her down to the point where her mental health was being affected and she found herself regularly in tears during training sessions. The Covid lockdowns happened at a perfect time for Kennedy, who pressed pause on her career and made a new commitment to pole vault. In 2021 she was a different athlete, breaking Boyd’s Australian record with a clearance of 4.82m and was in the form of her life coming into the Tokyo Olympics before an untimely quads injury derailed her campaign. And then when she got to Tokyo, Kennedy was forced to isolate away from the Olympic village just days out from competition after having been at the same training venue as American pole vaulter Sam Kendricks, who would later test positive for Covid.
She then failed to even get out of the qualifying round, finishing 12th. It was a career low but she bounced back to rightly take her place as one of the world’s best pole vaulters.