Continuous Chain

The continuous chain is the continuous input of energy by the vaulter into the vaulter-pole system across the whole event. It is not a description of how a vault looks. It is a statement about where the energy in a vault comes from and when it can be added.

Time is energy in the pole vault. At any point in a career an athlete’s body has a defined power — a finite amount of energy it can produce per unit of time. It follows that any time the vaulter is not putting energy into the system is lost time, and lost time cannot be recovered later in the vault. The total energy at the end is what the height depends on.

The time available is bounded in both parts of the event. Run up duration varies with the athlete and the length of the approach. The interval from leaving the ground to releasing the pole does not: at every level it falls between roughly 1.10 and 1.55 seconds. Elite men complete it in about 1.10 seconds, elite women in about 1.20, and the shorter figure is the better one — the interval contracts as the athlete delivers more energy into the system. At elite level the run up supplies roughly three quarters of the energy and the work on the pole the remaining quarter (≈75/25).

What it displaces. The conventional reading of the vault as a sequence of discrete phases, each with its own separate purpose, and the related habit of judging a vault by whether positions were reached rather than by whether energy was still entering the system.

The term was introduced by Roman Botcharnikov in The Continuous Chain Model in the Pole Vault, Track Coach No. 135, Spring 1996, pp. 4301–4304.