The Women’s Pole Vault in Doha Diamond League: A Most Impressive field and a curious competition

Stuart Weir is the senior writer of RunBlogRun for Europe. We have worked together since 2015, and one of my favorite times each year was spending time with my friend at the major events. Stuart Weir covered RBR during various seasons, and his coverage of the Diamond League, World Champs, European Champs and Olympics have been well recieved and well read! 

This is Stuart’s first columns on the 2025 Doha Diamond League meeting, and it is on the pole vault, an event of some consequence in Doha, with a spectacular field for the third Diamond League meeting of 2025. 

We thank Stuart Weir, once again, for his thoughtful writing for RunBlogRun, now in its 18th year. 

Pole vault

Molly Caudery started her outdoor season with a win at the Doha Diamond League.  Doha is not the easiest place to vault – remember the men’s pole vault being switched indoors a few years ago?  Molly won with 4.75  from Roberta Bruni ,Katie Moon, Emily Grove and Sandi Morris all on 4.63. Molly failed with her opening vault of 4.33 but then had a perfect sequence to  4.75.  Caudery was 4^th in the World Indoors but of the three medallists in Nanjing, Marie-Julie Bonnin, Tina Šutej and Angelica Moser, only  Šutej was in Doha and she was sixth.

Molly commented afterwards: “I absolutely have a lot of fire in me and that’s a good thing ahead of the new season. I had a lot of fun tonight. I was very excited for this comeback, there is a lot less pressure in the first competition of the year. I need to settle my vault and it went well. The weather conditions didn’t make things easy, there was some wind but I managed to navigate and then the wind stopped. After recovering and getting back to training I had a couple more injuries but now I am getting back to where I want to be and I’m trying to work on consistency. I’m training hard and that fire in me will help me get where I want this season”.

At the press conference yesterday, Katie Moon talked about how much she was looking forward to the 2025 season.  She commented afterwards: “I was really hoping for more, but at the same time the pole vault is tricky, the wind made it more tricky. I jumped my first two bars clean and then I made an adjustment based on what the wind was doing at that point, and then unfortunately I just didn’t feel my way, but really good things are happening. As I said in the press conference, this is the best bit of training I’ve ever had, a lot of it reflected out there. Unfortunately in the pole vault the height made it look like it was a bad day, but actually it was really good. It was very close, so I’m excited. For the pole vault, the challenge is that the wind and the conditions can affect us when we’re coming down, and when something distracts you in the take it off  it can really change the trajectory of your jump. We just have to learn how to deal with the elements.

“To recover I will take the next day off completely, my coach is really good at planning all my training, he’s done a really great job every season, figuring out how to get the most out of me, right. Now because it’s so early and it’s a long season, I’ve been training through, so I’m not in my sharpest yet, because I want to compete for September. So there are a lot of really good things happening. I put all of my faith in the next competition to have a good jump. For the next competition I will go to Rabat, at this point it is about getting those reps on the runway. I can’t get that in practice as you don’t have the same adrenaline and pressure. You get on the runway, you get the step consistent, that was part of what today was. If you are little bit off unfortunately, you miss the bar. I was on my biggest poles jumping through them, it was a bit technical, it’s a good day for us”.

Katie is one of my favorite athletes.  She is always so honest about her performances and happy to explain what happened and what she is trying to do. In 2022 she had a tough year and wondered how much longer she would compete,  Now she is wondering about the 2028 Olympics.

It was great to see Sandi Morris in the field too. She seems to have been competing for ever but she is just 32 and may have a few more years left in her.