Track and field is not an inherently risky exercise, except perhaps when sprinting flat out while carrying a long pole in your hands before attempting to vault well above the height of the standard double-decker bus.
When Conor Callinan was 13 years old, in training for this very exercise, his pole snapped cleanly in the middle and his vault ended up somewhere on the flat of his back. It didn't put him off: last June, aged 16, he became the youngest Irish senior athletics champion, winning the pole vault event at the Morton Stadium in Santry wearing the colours of Leevale Athletic Club.
This weekend Callinan returns to the Sport Ireland Indoor Arena at Abbotstown, where last month he improved the Irish under-20 pole vault record to 4.75 metres. He’s on his mid-term break from school at Coláiste an Chroí Naofa in Carrignavar, in Cork, and although still only 17 another senior title clearly beckons. He is that good.
No Irishman has even made the Olympic stage in the pole vault. There have been some height-breakers over the years - namely Ulick O’Connor, then Liam Hennessy, who broke five national records before setting a best of 4.70m. Today, the Irish outdoor record belongs to Brian McGovern, who took it from 5.06m to 5.36m in one day in Arizona in 2013.
Callinan is not yet at those heights, although that may only be a matter of time. Ask him where it all began - a rising Irish pole vaulter, in the country of skinny distance runners and the odd sprinter - and he immediately pays tribute to his early years in gymnastics, even if that exercise was somewhat less promising.
“I started off as a gymnast, was doing gymnastics since I was five, until aged nine”, he says. “Then I joined Leevale and did sprinting, my coach there suggested maybe I try the pole vault.
“Traditionally, a lot of good pole vaulters come from a gymnastics background, so at 13 I started, it’s been going good ever since. With gymnastics, I was at national level, but it was never going to go international.”
His sprints coach there was John Naughton, who continues to guide Callinan over the sprint hurdles, his other event; he’s also under the tutelage now of Derek Neff, a master of the pole vault in his own day.
Unusual
Still it’s unusual for an Irish athlete to start out in the pole vault, and even with his gymnastic background the challenges for Callinan were real. “You start off with small poles, into the sand pit, then move onto the mat, onto the bigger poles, then bigger run ups, then eventually you start jumping really high.
“It definitely wasn’t easy, at the start, but once I started marking improvements, quickly, because of the gymnastics background, it really helped, and the sprinting helped as well.
Even at age 17 Callinan wants to put the pole more centre stage of Irish athletics: “Yeah, I’d love to see that, even in my club it’s getting more popular, a lot more younger athletes starting in the event, coming through, and I’d like to bring it on a bit, and make it one of the standout events in Ireland.”
Callinan doesn't have to look far for inspiration. Arguably the biggest name in global athletics these days is Armand Duplantis - better known as Mondo, for short - the 22 year-old who won the Olympic title for Sweden last summer. His best of 6.18m, set indoors in February 2020, a world record indoors and out.
“It is getting such good screen time,” says Callinan, “and Mondo has a huge part to play in that, he’s become so well known. He’s still only 22, and he’s going over six metres in nearly every competition, so obviously watching that is motivation for me.
“He’s really, really fast, they’re all really fast, but he’s just the fastest with the pole. So he’s able to maintain that speed with the pole, and obviously he’s been doing it since he was three or four. Still it’s hard to wrap your head around what he does. But I’m still using 15-foot pole, so Mondo would be using 17-foot poles.”
Duplantis is coached by his American father Greg, who was also a pole vaulter, his mother Helena, from Sweden, a former heptathlete and volleyball player. Callinan has had his own challenges in breaking through the ranks. Not deliberately, obviously, the indoor training facility at Leevale cannot accommodate his lofty vaults.
“Yeah the roof is too low, so I can’t get the full run-up. If I want to get the full run up, I have to go either Nenagh, or the indoor arena in Dublin. I’m jumping around 4.75m, so you need over 5m, it’s only 4.5m, something like that.”
Not long perhaps before he raises the roof in other ways.
