Anicka Newell

LEGENDS ONLY: Happy birthday to Canada’s Anicka Newell, a three-time Olympian who has spent two of her birthdays competing at the Olympic Games.

That is not a figure of speech. Anicka was in the Olympic pole vault final in Tokyo on 5 August 2021, her twenty-eighth birthday, and she was back in Olympic qualification in Paris on 5 August 2024, her thirty-first. Rio, Tokyo, Paris. Ninth in the World Championship final at Eugene in 2022 and twelfth at London in 2017. Fifth at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham and seventh on the Gold Coast. Canadian national champion in Ottawa in 2018. She is the second-highest Canadian woman in the history of the event.

And she has just had her best season in five years. In February in Fayetteville she won the Arkansas Qualifier at 4.61m, a meet record that had stood since 2017, and her highest clearance since the 4.70m she vaulted in January 2021. It put her twenty-seventh on the world list.

The origin story is the good part. She was a gymnast from the age of two until a back injury at fourteen ended that career. She found the pole vault at sixteen, when her high school coach said the team needed a vaulter and she had been a gymnast, so that was that. Her dad built her a slide box at home so she could drill in the yard. She has said the reason she loves the event is that it is the closest she can get to flying, which is where the handle comes from, and she has been chasing that feeling across three Olympic Games and back up to 4.61m this year.

Happy birthday, Anicka! Three Olympic Games, two of them on this exact date, and a season best this year that beats everything since 2021. Here is to a great deal more airtime. 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇨🇦