Demoralised in Tokyo; gold medal winner in Paris. How Nina jump-started her career

This story is part of the November 30 edition of Good Weekend.See all 15 stories.

Nina Kennedy, Australia’s pole-vaulting gold medallist from Paris, has brown hair in a ponytail and bright blue eyes. Dressed in white jeans and a blue top, she looks like a regular 27-year-old – until she bends her arm. Then the flex of muscle between shoulder and elbow transforms her into someone who might own star-­spangled ­knickers, a golden tiara and the Lasso of Truth.

It’s 9am in Perth, and we’re standing just up the hill from Cottesloe Beach, peering into a windblown ­apartment garden. “My chin-up bar’s still there!” Kennedy cries, shivering and pointing to a rusted bar spanning a walkway. “How cool.” She looks around, taking in the old building as she rubs her arms. “Man, I was so happy here.”

We’re here in the wind (and, soon, the rain) because I’m in Perth, Kennedy’s home town, and she’s taking me on a tour of important places on her path to Olympic glory. This rundown apartment was where she spent most of her time between 2019 and 2021 ­during COVID-19, living with her boyfriend, business analyst and Aussie rules player Declan Mountford. Given these dates, it seems a slightly surprising place to choose, because this was her home base at the time of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, when she came 12th in her qualifying round and didn’t even make the final. The whole ­experience was awful: she was injured before the Games; she was exposed to COVID when she arrived; she was removed from the village and isolated alone in a hotel room. By the time she was due to compete she was so demoralised, she almost didn’t vault at all.

As we head back down towards the beach, I ask about this. Even though Tokyo was terrible, I say, did something else happen while you were here? Something that turned Tokyo into Paris? “God, yeah.” She laughs as we cross the road, hunched against the wind. “This was where I decided to stop being shit.”

Pole vault is arguably the most technically difficult, and certainly the most dangerous event in track and field. Until 20 years ago in the US, an average of one athlete a year died while vaulting, and another received “catastrophic injuries” which, in more than a third of cases, led to permanent disability. Since then, rule changes have improved safety, but injuries still happen – the kinds of injuries that sound more like the result of a multi-car pile-up than a sporting event. Between 2003 and 2011, reports the American Journal of Sports Medicine, US pole ­vaulters suffered 11 major head injuries (one fatality), four spine fractures (one with paraplegia), two pelvic fractures (both with intra-abdominal injuries), one brain stem injury (fatal), and one thoracic injury (rib fractures and pneumothorax). It’s worth remembering this when you watch pole vault: it takes a certain ­combination of confidence, chutzpah and nerve to know the thing you’re about to do could kill you.

At Kennedy’s school sports carnivals, “no one else had a chance,” recalls a friend. “She would win every single thing: the shot-put, the running, the hurdles.”Credit: Nic Walker

“I remember when she was six, playing hockey for the very first time,” recalled Kennedy’s mother Gwenda – a former elite lightweight rower herself – at the family home in Perth’s Peppermint Grove, the day before our tour. It’s a big, pale house – not fancy, but with a pool and full tennis court, and Kennedy grew up here after the family moved from Busselton when she was seven. (Gwenda and Kennedy’s father Steve owned the Busselton caravan park.) “She got hit in the face by the ball the very first week. The next week, she got hit in the face with a stick. Both weeks, she just kept on ­playing. And I thought, ‘This kid’s tough.’ ”

She was also much loved. Kennedy’s older sister Jane describes her baby sister as “a total hit from the day she was born. I was seven, and having a little sister was just the coolest thing. We’re basically holding her ­upside down in every photo.” This seems to describe the tenor of her childhood: as the youngest of four (Kennedy also has two brothers, Luke and Joel), she had to muck in with everyone else, but the family ­always rallied when she competed. Everyone went to Paris except Jane, who was pregnant. “I usually watch her with a glass of champagne and half a Valium,” she confesses, “so Paris really sucked.”

There have been plenty of occasions for champagne in the past two years: the World Athletics Championships in 2023, for example, when (in an unprecedented event in elite pole vault history) Kennedy shared victory with American Katie Moon after suggesting they both win rather than proceed to the usual jump-off. Kennedy won the final of the international athletics series known as the Diamond League in 2022 – then crushed ­everyone again this year, taking out the $US30,000 ­finals title in September.

Kennedy and US rival Katie Moon shared the gold medal at the 2023 world championships.Credit: Getty Images

Two of the biggest achievements in international pole vaulting down; one – the Olympics – to go. Before Paris, an Australian woman had never won a gold medal in Olympic field events. Nina Kennedy, according to her family, is tough and used to being upside down. What other qualities could she possibly need?

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Pole vault has always had a slightly melodramatic quality. The Greeks vaulted over walls or onto horses’ backs, and the ancient Celts had a ­competitive sport that originated with farmers, who routinely used poles to vault over bogs and ditches. (I’d pay good money to see a farmer vault a bog.) But both these activities were really about length; modern pole vault, which privileges height, emerged in Germany in the 1790s, then England and the US in the 1800s. The original landing ground was sand – presumably it got softer as the poles got longer. By 1896, men’s pole vault was popular enough to be in the inaugural modern Olympic Games. But it took until 2000, at the Sydney Olympics, for women to be included.

Not everyone can be a pole vaulter, because it ­requires two qualities that rarely coexist in a single athlete: brute power and fastidious technique. Nina Kennedy has both. “Nina is the most powerful athlete in the national athletics strength-testing database,” says Ben Raysmith, sports and exercise ­physiotherapist at the Western Australian Institute of Sport (WAIS), where Australia’s elite pole vault program is based.

A quiet man with a very calm manner, he’s worked with Kennedy since 2019. “Kilo for kilo, out of all of the 260-odd tests we’ve done, all round the country, in all the event groups, Nina is the most ­powerful person we’ve tested. Even ‘super-15’ rugby players: she is stronger than all of them. That’s her super­power. She’s also very fast. Out of all the vaulters around the world, she’s one of the fastest. And she is very good at funnelling power from her run, into the pole, to then spit her up high.”

In other words: Kennedy is an ­enormously talented natural athlete. Representing the state in gymnastics at primary school; winning the under-11 100 metres state championship; being invited to join the WAIS scholarship program for pole vault at 12: these are signs of natural gifts. One of her best friends, Stephanie Leibovitch, remembers being at high school with Kennedy at Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Claremont. At sports carnivals, “no one else had a chance,” she recalls. “She would win every single thing: the shot-put, the running, the hurdles. Honestly, the whole school would stop and watch her. I remember one year she’d injured her leg and couldn’t run – she had a boot on – and we were all like, ‘Finally! A chance to win!’ ”

Given Kennedy’s all-round athletic talent, pole vault might seem an unusual sport to choose. “I don’t know if I really chose pole vault,” she laughs. “The national [high-performance pole vault] program was here [in Perth], and Steve [Hooker, who won Olympic gold in 2008] was still very much around, and it was a bit like, ‘If I want to go to the Olympics, from here in WA, maybe this is my path.’ I enjoyed it, I had the scholarship, and as the years passed I began to win stuff. So at some point you just think, ‘OK, this is what I do.’ I didn’t choose pole vault; pole vault chose me.”

In 2015, at only 17, Kennedy broke the junior world ­record for pole vault, clearing 4.59 metres. That height qualified her, despite her youth, for the World Athletics Championships in China in 2015. (Athletes typically graduate to senior events at 20.) But in Beijing, she failed to clear her first height. The same thing happened at the 2016 World U20 Championships. Meanwhile, that 4.59-metre mark would have also qualified her for the 2016 Rio Olympics – but she failed to replicate it in qualifying events. Her family, who’d bought tickets to Rio in expectation of her competing, went anyway and had a ball. “Did Mum tell you?” asks Kennedy at the beach, shaking her head. “They went and came back with all this Olympics merch and filled the house with it! And I was like, ‘What the hell, Mum?’ ”

In her early 20s and unable to compete during COVID, Kennedy remembers thinking: “I’m not going to keep training, I’m not putting all this effort in to be shit.”Credit: Nic Walker

After the Olympics stuff-up – “I was 18, and silly” is how she describes it – Kennedy qualified again for the 2017 IAAF World Championships in London, but withdrew less than a fortnight out with injury. In 2018, her 4.71-metre clearance was the third-highest ever by an Australian female vaulter, and she took bronze at the Commonwealth Games. In 2019, she was dogged by injury. And at the end of that year, she moved to the beach.

After we collect our coffees, we cross to the edge of the sand and take up a position on a lookout between two cafes. “So, I want to describe what happened the best way I can,” Kennedy says, her ponytail blowing straight out from her head in the wind. “It was COVID, I was 22, 23, living down here with Dec. I couldn’t travel to compete, and I just had all this time, you know. I’d have one uni class a day [Kennedy graduated from Perth’s Notre Dame University with a degree in behavioural science last year] and that would be it. So I’d go on these really long walks on the beach, and listen to podcasts and read books and just hang out. And I guess that time allowed me to sort of turn inward a bit, and think about things. And I realised I was starting to feel like I was missing out on things, you know? All my ­girlfriends were travelling, finishing their uni degrees and getting on with their lives, and I was still training for pole vault. And doing OK but not quite … And I was like, ‘I’m not going to keep training, I’m not putting all this effort in to be shit.’ ”

The medal winning started in primary school.Credit: Courtesy of Nina Kennedy

She grins. “So that was one thing. And another thing was that junior world record [back in 2015]. When I thought about that, I was like, ‘OK, you were the best junior athlete to ever do this sport. You know you have the talent, but you’re not living up to it.’ ”

She turns and looks at the sea. “Around that time, there were athletes in my environment who were older than me, and I could see their careers not going ­anywhere.” She turns back. “And this might sound bad, but I thought, ‘I don’t want to get to their age and still be not quite there, you know? I want to make something out of this. I want to grab my career by the throat and make some moves.’ ” She nods. “So then it was like, ‘OK, well. How are we going to figure that out?’ ”

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Australians are used to our athletes winning Olympic medals. Perhaps too used to it. “Inside the world of sport, Olympic medals – gold, silver, or bronze – are all viewed as just ­exceptional things,” says Ben Raysmith. “So when the media says, ‘Oh, unfortunately it was only a bronze’ – that’s the biggest mistake in athletics. If you make an Olympic final, you are a rock star: you are the best of the best in the world and everyone wants to be you. People have no idea how incredibly rare it is to medal at all. And Nina right now, being world champion, Diamond League champion and Olympic champion … I think the number of times that’s happened, in all of world athletics, you could count on one hand.”

On the face of it, Nina Kennedy was not the pole vaulter most likely to succeed. If your physical potential is your natural ability plus training minus injuries, she’s been handicapped for most of her career. Her take-off leg – her left – is a mass of scar tissue: she’s had at least seven major injuries to the rectus femoral muscle in her quad. And at the end of last season (after her Olympics and Diamond League victories) she had an active stress fracture in her spine – worse this year than ever before – penetrating 80 per cent of the way through her L5 vertebra.

With physio Ben Raysmith, who notes, “People have no idea how incredibly rare it is to medal at all.”Credit: Courtesy of Nina Kennedy

Such injuries are legitimately ­dramatic, if predictable – pole vault is notoriously hard on the body – but after Kennedy’s epiphany at the beach, she began to engage with her health and fitness in a new way. If her life was a movie, this would be the Rocky montage moment, in which she does a series of sleep studies, begins eating organically, minutely interrogates her recovery and rehab routines, and learns to meditate and journal. (This is Rocky in the new millennium, clearly.)

Her partner Declan Mountford, 27, had a front-row seat to all this: they’d been together less than a year when it began. A tall, quiet guy, he was drafted by the AFL’s North Melbourne as a teenager before returning to the WAFL (where he now co-captains Claremont), so he’s no stranger to elite sports. Indeed, for most of their relationship, he’s been more famous than Kennedy – at least in Perth. “Oh, but I’m definitely the WAG now,” he says, self-
deprecatingly. “I’m just the handbag in pictures.” He describes her as “fiercely driven. Even when she wasn’t really getting the results a few years ago, in terms of her day-to-day process, she hasn’t wavered. She hasn’t had a day off, really, since I’ve known her. I mean, she has her downtime, but her end-goal and every decision she makes has been ­towards winning the Olympic Games.”

With partner, AFL player Declan Mountford, who jokes he’s now the WAG in the relationship.Credit: Courtesy of Nina Kennedy

Being willing to take control of your life and goals like this is what Ben Raysmith calls the “mic-drop moment”, without which athletes never achieve their full potential. “It’s when you see an athlete stop being passive or dismissive or overly compliant about what’s happening to them, and stop coasting on their talent, and really engage with their own strengths and ­weaknesses,” he explains. “That’s when you know they’ve really opened themselves to the possibility of great success.”

Kennedy was aided by the fact that she was already within the high-performance structure of Australian sport: as a WAIS scholarship-holder since she was a teenager, her coaching, training facilities and medical costs have been paid for, as has travel to competitions. She was also lucky to already live in WA, so she never had to travel to train. “It’s been a great set-up for her,” says Steve Hooker, who was a commentator in Paris and has known Kennedy since she was a teen. He too trained in WA, but moved from Melbourne to do so. “She’s had her support network around her; she’s had another great pole vaulter [Kurtis Marschall] to train with and push her, without directly competing with her.”

It hasn’t been a perfect run, however. During her career, Kennedy has lost two coaches in dramatic ­circumstances. The first, Alex Parnov, was sacked as WAIS pole vault head coach in 2019 when an internal investigation found that he had, according to a WAIS statement, “breached his employment contract”. The second, Paul Burgess, resigned suddenly in April this year, only three months before the Olympics. Kennedy, who had no idea that resignation was coming, describes it as “really hard. For a few days, it really rattled me. But then I just told myself, ‘I’m not going to let this ruin something that I’ve been working towards my whole life. This isn’t going to define my story.’ ”

Despite Burgess leaving WAIS, Athletics Australia stepped in with a temporary contract for him, so he accompanied the team to Paris as Kennedy’s coach. “It was a situation none of us wanted so close to the Olympics,” he says over email, but “it was great to be able to coach her to achieve her dream.”

“We made it work,” Kennedy agrees. And at the end of the day, “How I perform – that’s on me. And I like that pressure. I like that control.”

Alongside optimising every ounce of physical potential, giving yourself a chance at Olympic gold means getting to grips with your mind. Kennedy has always been open about her experience of depression. 2016 was “by far the hardest year in my life”, she told WorldAthletics.org in 2021. “I was devastated to miss out on the [Rio] Olympics, but I was just not in a good place mentally.” At times, she’s felt so bad she’s been unable to train, she admits at the cafe where we stop for brunch. “There were a few years where I was really low. I was on antidepressants for a while, and I think they helped with mental support. I mean, no one ­teaches you how to be an elite athlete when you’re 19 and feeling all these things about growing up.” What helped more, she thinks, was her journey in 2020, when she began focusing not on being good at pole vault, but being good at being happy.

“I was the kid who always won everything,” she says. “The way [her friend] Steph [Leibovitch] described school – the whole school would stop because I was racing. Or I’d get a special mention in assembly or whatever. And so as you grow up, you just tie your worth to winning. I used to think, ‘Oh. I’m the one who wins.’ ”

With friend Stephanie Leibovitch, who recalls Kennedy’s dominance at school sports carnivals.Credit: Courtesy of Nina Kennedy

“And god bless Dec,” she says suddenly, using Mountford’s nickname. “Quite early on with him, I ­realised, ‘You do still love me.’ Whatever competition I’m doing, Dec would always message me the same thing. ‘No matter how you go, good luck. We still love you, it doesn’t matter.’”

She looks sheepish. “It sounds so silly, but when you grow up winning, you’re cele­brated, and then you link that celebration with love.” She sits back. “So that was one of my big realisations: that Dec and my family and my friends would love me even if I failed.”

Ironically, it was realising failure was OK that freed Kennedy to believe she could be a major-league winner. And then, just as she was figuring that out, Tokyo ­happened, “and the whole thing crumbled”. She laughs. “Which was fine. At the time I was so close to not competing. But then I decided, ‘Just go out and act according to your values. And that means just going out and giving it my best shot and whatever happens, happens.’ ”

With mum Gwenda and dad Steve.Credit: Courtesy of Nina Kennedy

It was a pivotal moment. She competed, she did badly, she survived. “I was genuinely proud of myself.” After that, Kennedy stopped equating success with love; and she stopped caring what the rest of the world thought. This freedom is what lay behind her widely publicised remarks before the Olympics, when, unusually, she openly declared she was going for gold in Paris. “I didn’t plan to say it,” she admits. “But that’s what my core team and I were talking about, that was our goal, so I just said it. ‘This is what I want to do and I want to die trying.’ And if anyone can learn anything from that, it’s like, well: ‘Permission to dream big and fail.’ ”

Or not fail, as the case may be.

The WA Institute of Sport is a low-slung modern building surrounded by gum trees, across the road from the oval where Kennedy did Little Athletics as a child. She trains here five days a week, though because it’s so hard on the body, only one or two sessions involve actual ­vaulting. At the indoor vaulting pit (the only one in Australia), I help wind the bar to her Olympic height of 4.90 metres. Just the winding exhausts me – god knows what it would be like to actually jump it. The standard height of a modern house ceiling is 2.4 metres, which means Kennedy is basically leaping a two-storey flat-roofed house in a single bound.

What does it feel like, being able to jump that high? “I think I’ve really learnt to love it,” says Kennedy. “I didn’t fall in love with it the first time I did it or anything. But as I’ve got older, I’ve become obsessed with the process – with the idea of mastery and the ­actual technical detail.”

The technical detail of pole vault, frankly, boggles the mind. First, take up your position approximately 33 metres from the bar (Kennedy’s run-up distance), and take hold of your 4.45-metre pole (her biggest) on your right side. Run hell for leather for 10 steps, keeping your body “upright and tall and bouncy”. Then, as Kennedy’s father puts it, “really turn the afterburners on” for six steps. While running at top speed, begin to smoothly lower the pole so that it enters the box cleanly. Use your arms to force the pole to bend; drive upward with your take-off leg. Throw your other leg up and hang your body off the pole. Curl into a ball as the pole begins to lift you; drive upwards with your arms and shoulders; extend your legs until you are vertically upside down. As your feet reach towards the bar, twist your body 180 degrees. Watch as your tummy passes over the bar. Don’t straighten too soon; let go of the pole. Fall on your back on the mat, avoiding landing on your pole.

At the Stade de France, do all this in front of a live audience of 77,000 and a global audience of more than three billion. Win gold.

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On the front verandah of Nina Kennedy’s cream-coloured rental, which she and Mountford share with four friends, is a five-metre purple bag. This is Nina’s pole bag, which she hasn’t touched since she plonked it down after the Diamond League final in September. Moving her poles around the world is a ­logistical challenge: not all airlines accept them; not all plane baggage holds are long enough to accommodate them; and no taxi on earth can carry them. If she’d got off the plane in Paris in July to find her poles were ­missing, it would not have been the first time.

Luckily, they were there the evening of Wednesday, August 7 – as were 30-odd friends and relatives wearing T-shirts decorated with her name. The women’s pole vault final lasted more than three hours. Early in the evening, Kennedy cleared her lower jumps, then went cleanly over 4.90 metres. She then got her “money pole” out – longer and stiffer than the rest – ready to go for 4.95 metres if second-placed Katie Moon, who’d ­decided to pass on attempting 4.90 metres after one failed jump, managed to clear 4.95 metres. Then there was a technical issue with the standards (the uprights that hold the bar), resulting in an almost half-hour delay. At that point, says Kennedy, “Katie lost her marbles.” Rattled by the malfunction, Moon began criticising the officials. Watching her, Kennedy thought, ” ‘OK, this is my moment to just be cool, be calm, and just handle this pressure.’ ”

When jumping resumed, Moon failed to clear her final attempt at 4.95 metres. The gold medal was Kennedy’s. She screamed and ran over to her team: Paul Burgess, Kurtis Marschall, Ben Raysmith. “Nina Kennedy, you are a legend!” Steve Hooker announced in the commentary box; down on the track, Matt Denny, the Australian who’d just won bronze in the discus throw and Kennedy’s friend since the pair were teenagers, grabbed her in a bear hug. “You won?” he asked. “Yes! Yes!” she shouted.

That night, the entire Kennedy crew hit Paris wearing their Nina shirts. (Kennedy, who had to do media, was still wearing her competition shorts.) Everywhere they went, people celebrated with them, thrilled to be on the edge of so much excitement, so much astounded joy. “My dad and his partner were there,” recalls Steph Leibovitch. “And they’re in their 50s. And they were like, ‘This is one of the highlights of our lives.’ I think everyone felt that: it was a highlight of life.”

Wearing “Nina” T-shirts at the Games, Kennedy’s Paris supporters went out on the town after her gold-medal win.Credit: Courtesy of Nina Kennedy

Kennedy agrees. “It really was. It was just the most amazing ­feeling ever. Ever.” She grins. “So it’s like, ‘On to LA.’ ”

So that’s what the next four years hold for Nina Kennedy. Staying in charge of her training, her body, her mind, her career, in readiness for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 2028. She’s talking to Ben Raysmith about taking some time for her spine to recover, but also getting back into training. “She’s already said she doesn’t want to have a really long break,” Raysmith says. “So figuring out the best management plan between what her body can handle, and what she wants to accomplish – those are the conversations we’re having now.”

Winning has helped her finances – but not as much as you might imagine. Her gold medal earnt Kennedy $20,000 from the Australian Olympic Committee and $US50,000 from World Athletics; she also belongs to the sports talent agency that looks after Mary Fowler, Ellyse Perry and Jess Fox. Sponsorship deals, other earnings from podium finishes, and athlete support from the Australian Sports Commission will hopefully fund her until LA without her having to go back to waitressing, as she did for years to make the rent.

However (un)lucrative it may be, as is the case for all athletes, Kennedy’s career won’t last forever. After – or, indeed, before – LA, anything might happen. Mountford comes from a farm on the coast near Albany he’s keen to return to, and a part of Kennedy seems interested in that prospect. “If you’re going to be a farmer, it’s beautiful,” she says. “I can see myself down there, just immersing myself in the country life.”

But not yet. Some people are surprised she’s not retiring – going out on a high, as it were. “But I think what people forget is that she’s been building up to this moment her entire life,” says Leibovitch. “It’s like, if you finally get the promotion you’ve worked your arse off for, you don’t then just go, ‘All right, I’m leaving now.’ ”

“That’s it,” agrees Kennedy, standing on her front porch. “I’m at the top of my game. I’m in my peak ­physical form. Mentally, I’m prepared and trained. Now is my time to ride this wave. Now’s my time.”

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