Aleka Zeitseva

Happy birthday to Russia’s pole vaulter Aleka Zaytseva, who has already cleared 4.20 metres.

That number deserves to be sat with for a second. Four metres and twenty centimetres is a serious height for a vaulter of any age, and she cleared it at fifteen. Pole vault is the event where progress is measured in five-centimetre increments and paid for in years, because every step up the bar means a longer pole, a faster run-up and, in effect, relearning the whole movement from the ground. An athlete who is over 4.20m before her seventeenth birthday has already done the hardest part of that apprenticeship.

The vault is also the event that asks the most of an athlete’s nerve. Everything about it is counterintuitive. You sprint at full speed carrying a five-metre pole, plant it into a box in the ground, let it throw you upside down, and then trust that the whole thing will fold you over a bar four metres in the air with nothing under you but a mat. Every single one of those steps has to be right or none of them work. Vaulters spend more of their training time failing than any other athletes in the sport, and they choose it anyway.

Nobody writes about junior pole vaulters. Sprinters get the cameras and the finals get the highlights, and a sixteen-year-old going over 4.20 metres somewhere in Russia gets a line in a results table if she is lucky. So: it happened, it is a genuinely good height, and the years when vaulters make their biggest gains are still in front of her.

С днём рождения, Алека! Желаем крепкого здоровья, счастья и успехов — и чтобы каждая планка покорялась с первой попытки. За именинницу! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇷🇺