Certification Board
Pilots have a saying: it’s better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than in the air wishing you were on the ground. Pole vaulters should adopt it. No event on the track is more sensitive to weather than ours. A gusty crosswind that barely registers in the 1600 can make the vault genuinely dangerous. Reading the conditions is a coaching skill, the same as selecting poles, and it deserves the same daily attention.
Weather belongs on your daily risk assessment, every single session. Our Management of Risk article puts it on the environment checklist for a reason: rain, sleet, snow and excessive wind are all conditions that can make pole vaulting too dangerous at times. Weather is not bad luck. It is one more risk to be managed. It should be assessed daily, adjusted for, and respected. This post covers how to do that: what each condition does to a vault, what adjustments buy you, and how to recognize the moment when no adjustment is enough.
A quick caveat: “too bad to vault” happens less often than you might think. Experienced officials can complete most competitions safely with smart delays and adjustments. The goal here isn’t to make you gun-shy every time the flag on the standards flutters. It’s to give you a framework so the call is a decision, not a guess.
Wind is the trickiest condition because it isn’t one condition. It’s four.
Tailwind is the one everybody wants, and it’s also the one that quietly invites trouble. Free runway speed means more energy into the pole, so athletes break out the big poles and grip higher. That is fine, as long as the steps come back with it. Extra speed lengthens the stride and moves the takeoff in tight to the box. Move the start back, re-check the takeoff step, and make your moves one variable at a time. Never adjust a grip upward in increments larger than two or three inches per jump. That rule doesn’t get suspended just because the wind is friendly. A tailwind day is a PR opportunity because of the discipline, not instead of it.
Headwind does the opposite. It steals runway speed, and runway speed is what stands the pole up. The classic headwind failure is the vaulter who keeps their normal grip and normal pole, comes in slow, and stalls out over the box instead of penetrating into the pit. The standing rule covers it: lower your grip if you are not penetrating deep enough into the landing pad to produce a safe vault. Drop down a pole or two, lower the grip, move the steps up, and accept that today is not the day for a big bar. There’s no shame in it. Stalling out and landing short is how vaulters end up in the box area, and the box area is where the event’s worst injuries happen.
Crosswind is the sneaky one. It doesn’t slow anyone down, so it doesn’t look dangerous, but it pushes the pole carry around like a sail, drifts the run off line, and puts athletes down near the side edges of the pad instead of the middle. There’s a rule for that too: lower your grip if you are landing near the side edges of the pad. A lower grip and a controlled run beat a full-speed attempt that finishes on the corner of the pit. If your vaulters can’t keep the pole tip steady during the carry, or they’re consistently landing off-center, that’s your cue to back things down, or shut it down.
Gusts are worse than any steady wind. A steady 15 mph wind is something you can plan around; a swirling, gusting wind changes the rules between the start of the run and the plant. Teach your athletes to use their full allotted time and wait for the lull. Smart vaulters time their attempts to the calm windows. And know the unmistakable signs that the day is over: I’ve seen officials close a pit the moment a gust lifted the front buns of the pad off the ground. That’s not a judgment call anymore. If the wind is moving the landing system, it has answered the question for you.
Ask veteran officials what the single biggest weather hazard in the vault is and most won’t say wind, they’ll say rain. The reason is simple: everything in this event depends on the connection between two hands and a piece of fiberglass. Rain attacks exactly that.
A slipped grip at takeoff is one of the scariest failures in the sport, because the energy has nowhere to go. It’s like an electrical fault with no ground wire: the energy takes whatever path it can find, and you don’t want that path to be you. In this event, the pit is the ground wire. When the grip slips, the vaulter becomes the path, coming down wherever physics drops them. Most of the time that’s still the pit, just uglier than anyone planned. Those are the close calls. The box is what happens when the luck runs out.
Some moisture does not automatically end a competition, and championship meets don’t move indoors over a drizzle. But the moment grips start slipping, the event needs to stop. Good officials watch the top handhold on every jump in wet conditions for exactly this reason. A visible slip is the standard cue to suspend. As a coach, don’t wait for the official to see it. If your athlete tells you their hands are going, believe them.
If you have to compete in the rain, fight for every dry minute. I covered the routine in Ground Rules: poles stay in the bag between attempts, a towel stays on your shoulder for wiping grips, and soaked grip tape gets changed immediately. Chalking over wet tape just makes slippery paste. Pack dry shirts and gloves in the gear bag for between jumps, and remember the runway itself is part of the problem: wet approach, wet takeoff spot, wet plant. Everything degrades together.
Cold doesn’t produce dramatic failures the way wind and rain do. It quietly degrades everything. Muscles lose elasticity, sprint mechanics tighten up, and the explosive jump at takeoff (the thing the whole vault is built on) loses its snap. Cold poles feel stiffer until they acclimate, which I touched on in Ground Rules, give them time to warm up in the sun before anybody jumps on them.
The most underrated cold-weather hazard is numb hands. A vaulter who can’t feel the pole can’t feel a grip starting to slip, which means the first warning sign of the scariest failure in the sport is gone. Keep hands warm between attempts, and treat wind chill as part of the temperature, not a footnote to it.
There’s no magic number in any rulebook where vaulting becomes unsafe, and you’ll see vaulters compete in some ugly conditions at early-season invitationals. The honest framework is this: cold lengthens everything. Longer warm-ups, longer re-warm-ups between attempts, more conservative poles and grips. A vaulter who has been standing around for an hour between attempts in the cold is not warmed up anymore, no matter what the clock says. Long inactivity is a hazard of its own and if the schedule and conditions don’t allow your athlete to be genuinely warm when they step on the runway, that’s not toughness. That’s an unmanaged risk.
This is the only section of this post with no nuance in it. Thunder or lightning means everyone leaves the field. NFHS guidance is to suspend activity and wait at least 30 minutes from the last strike or rumble, restarting the clock with each new one. You are carrying a long pole in the middle of an open field. There is no bar, no qualifying mark, and no championship worth contesting that call. Get inside, cover the pit, and wait it out.
Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough. At a meet, the official runs the competition. Suspending or resuming the event is their duty. But the coach always has the last word for their own athlete. If you think conditions are unsafe for your vaulter, pull them off the runway. The event is voluntary. You can pass heights. You can scratch. There’s a line veteran coaches and officials pass around that sums it up: “Don’t let your vaulter be the one that makes officials decide it’s too bad to vault.” Make the conservative call yourself, before the conditions make it for you.
One more thing officials want coaches to know: suspended is not cancelled. Weather moves through. A thirty-minute delay often gives back a perfectly vaultable evening. Don’t let athletes mentally pack it in the moment the cover goes on the pit, and don’t let them cool down into a worse situation than the weather was. Re-warm-up is part of the delay.
Everything above is about meets, where there’s something on the line. At practice, there’s nothing on the line. If the conditions are marginal, don’t vault. Drill. A bad-weather day is a gift: pole runs and plant drills down the runway, takeoff work into the long jump pit, the grass progressions from our beginning formulas, video review, flex testing the pole shed. Your athletes get better and nobody leaves the ground in conditions you wouldn’t accept at a meet. The fastest way to lose credibility on weather calls at meets is to ignore the same conditions at practice on a random Tuesday.
Pulling it all together, here’s the decision ladder, in order:
Weather decisions are risk management, the same lesson the vault teaches everywhere else: assess the environment, adjust what you can control, and never let momentum (a meet schedule, a qualifying window, a kid who really wants one more jump) make a safety decision that belongs to you. Most days the answer is “vault, with adjustments.” Some days the answer is no. Knowing the difference is the job.
There will always be another meet. Make the call that makes sure there’s always another vaulter.