Track and Field Blogs - Steve Hooker

As a pole vaulter in Europe you get to experience all sorts of different competitions. Sure you get to compete in big stadiums in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans for big prize-money and I'll get the chance to do this on Friday when I compete in the Paris leg of the Golden League series. As a pole vaulter though, you get the opportunity to compete in competitions that few other athletes would experience and these are the 'town square' competition. They are held in town squares, shopping centers, airports, breweries or as the case was in Jockgrim, down the side of a soccer field. They are usually held in smaller towns as a part of their annual town festival and they are a lot of fun. I competed in one of these competitions on Saturday in a town called Jockgrim in the south of Germany. The local soccer competition has been running the competition in Jockgrim for the past 14 years and to give you an idea of the atmosphere of the competition I will give you a quote from the meet director, Gunther 'when we started running the competition we didn't know a lot about pole vault but we knew how to drink beer'. The competition is like a big party and it's actually sponsored by a beer company. About 3000 people stand just metres either side of the run up and when they scream the noise is deafening. As the night goes on and the bar gets higher the crowd gets drunker and louder. Each athlete gets to choose a song to jump to, I jumped to Kids by MGMT. As it gets dark the lights get turned on and it creates an atmosphere more like that of a movie set than that of an elite sporting event. You start your run-up in near darkness and run into floodlit takeoff area.It's quite an experience. I won the competition with a jump of 5.80m (see video) ahead of two Germans, Alex Straub (5.75m) and Tim Lobinger (5.63m). After the meet I was presented with a trophy and a massive 2 litre glass of beer, it's pictured next to my size 12 shoe. I love doing these meets, they are a lot of fun and a great break from the bigger meets on the World Athletics Tour. It's great to see different parts of Europe and the way they celebrate whilst also promoting pole vault and athletics.