A vaulter buys height with speed and pays for it at the plant

Everything a pole vaulter does on the runway is an attempt to arrive at the box fast without flinching.

A pole vault looks like an upper body event and is nothing of the sort. What clears the bar is the energy the vaulter carried down the runway, stored in a bending pole, and got back on the way up. The arms are mostly there to make sure the transaction happens cleanly.

So the runway is the event. A faster approach means more energy available, which allows a longer or stiffer pole, which returns more of that energy at the top. That is the whole chain, and every serious vaulter is essentially a sprinter who has agreed to carry something awkward.

The plant is where it goes wrong. In the final two strides the vaulter has to drive the pole up and forward into the box while still accelerating, and the natural human response to running full speed at a fixed metal slot is to slow down slightly. Nobody decides to do this. The body does it on its own. That small deceleration is the difference between a vault that lifts and one that stalls with the athlete pushed back into the pit.

What makes it brutal is that the penalty for arriving too fast for your equipment is not a bad jump, it is a dangerous one. Choose a pole that is too soft for your speed and it can bend past the point of return. Choose one too stiff and you get stopped dead and dropped. Vaulters make that equipment decision on the day, in the wind, with a competition running, and it is closer to a judgement about the weather than to anything you can put in a training plan.

Which is why I would argue vaulting is the least coachable of the jumps at the elite level. You can build speed. You can drill the plant a thousand times. You cannot train the specific nerve required to run flat out at a hole in the ground on a gusty afternoon in front of a full stadium.

Every other event rewards an athlete for holding something back at the wrong moment. This one punishes it immediately, and visibly, and from a considerable height.