Pole vaulting is a spectacular, dangerous sport. Modern poles could be drastically improved to make them more reliable, with healable tech being developed that could also be used in surfing and cycling.
I’m sorry but poles shattering sending shrapnel all over the place is not valuable, it’s dangerous.
If they could be replaced with a material that’s similarly springy but doesn’t shatter but degrades in a safe manner as faults accumulate that’d be a definitive improvement.
Identifying damaged poles keep poles from shattering by taking them out of circulation.
If they could keep poles from being capable of shattering, obviously that would be good. But they haven’t done that or showed any particular indication that they have a realistic path to doing that. “We can do it on a flat surface and think it’s almost as good as new” is worth exploring, but it’s best case a very long way off and may never be possible in real world use cases at real world scale and pricing at all.
The highlighting micro-fractures is absolutely achievable in the near future, could absolutely be a new safety requirement in a reasonable time frame, and could very easily be understood and checked by both coaches and players prior to every jump.
But pumping up a solution decades in the future while dismissing a solution that’s practical now doesn’t make sense, and (per this coverage) isn’t intended to resolve any of the other points of failure. It (might) mitigate some of the fracturing if given enough time in between to cure. It won’t address manufacturing failures, it won’t address any out of spec use, it won’t address the fact that materials age over time (the reason that nearly all protective equipment has a finite lifespan before you should throw it away and replace it no matter how hard it was used). Giving a false sense of safety to a longer lifespan when it shouldn’t have one regardless is potentially as harmful as giving people confidence that poles that aren’t fractured aren’t fractured.
I’m sorry but poles shattering sending shrapnel all over the place is not valuable, it’s dangerous.
If they could be replaced with a material that’s similarly springy but doesn’t shatter but degrades in a safe manner as faults accumulate that’d be a definitive improvement.
Identifying damaged poles keep poles from shattering by taking them out of circulation.
If they could keep poles from being capable of shattering, obviously that would be good. But they haven’t done that or showed any particular indication that they have a realistic path to doing that. “We can do it on a flat surface and think it’s almost as good as new” is worth exploring, but it’s best case a very long way off and may never be possible in real world use cases at real world scale and pricing at all.
The highlighting micro-fractures is absolutely achievable in the near future, could absolutely be a new safety requirement in a reasonable time frame, and could very easily be understood and checked by both coaches and players prior to every jump.
Por que no los dos?
Only thing worse than a sense of safety is a false sense of safety.
Researching it is great. I said that.
But pumping up a solution decades in the future while dismissing a solution that’s practical now doesn’t make sense, and (per this coverage) isn’t intended to resolve any of the other points of failure. It (might) mitigate some of the fracturing if given enough time in between to cure. It won’t address manufacturing failures, it won’t address any out of spec use, it won’t address the fact that materials age over time (the reason that nearly all protective equipment has a finite lifespan before you should throw it away and replace it no matter how hard it was used). Giving a false sense of safety to a longer lifespan when it shouldn’t have one regardless is potentially as harmful as giving people confidence that poles that aren’t fractured aren’t fractured.