Eliza McCartney has won the Commonwealth Games pole vault title at Scotstoun Stadium in Glasgow, holding off defending champion Nina Kennedy of Australia and taking New Zealand’s second athletics gold of the Games.
McCartney cleared 4.65m in a final held on Friday evening in Scotland, which was early on Saturday morning back home. Kennedy matched that height but finished with silver on countback, the rule that separates vaulters level on height by counting the failed attempts each of them had along the way. New Zealander Imogen Ayris took bronze with 4.55m, and RNZ reported the win as McCartney’s first Commonwealth gold.
The tiebreak will mean something particular to McCartney, because the last time a major title in Glasgow came down to countback she was the one who lost. At the 2024 World Athletics Indoor Championships, held in the same city, she cleared 4.80m and finished second to Britain’s Molly Caudery on exactly that rule. Two years on the count went her way.
Kennedy was no ordinary opponent to beat. The Australian won the Commonwealth title at Birmingham in 2022, won Olympic gold in Paris in 2024, and carried her country’s flag into the opening ceremony in Glasgow. She has spent the past two seasons as the benchmark in the event, which is part of why the New Zealand vaulters were treated as challengers rather than favourites going into the final.
The winning height of 4.65m is well short of what McCartney has managed in her best years. Her outdoor best of 4.94m, set at a street vault competition in Jockgrim, Germany, in July 2018, still stands as the Commonwealth and Oceania record and was the best jump in the world that season. The Commonwealth Games record of 4.75m, set by Canada’s Alysha Newman on the Gold Coast in 2018, also survived the night. Championship pole vault is rarely won on raw numbers, though. It is won by whoever handles a long evening, a cooling runway and a shortening list of attempts better than everyone else.
McCartney is 29 and has been carrying New Zealand expectation in this event for a decade. She grew up in Devonport on Auckland’s North Shore, went to Takapuna Grammar School and only took up the pole vault at 14, in 2011, after a childhood spread across netball, gymnastics, swimming and high jump. Within three years she had a world junior record. In 2016, at 19 years and 252 days, she cleared 4.80m in the Rio Olympic final and won bronze, making her the youngest Olympic medallist in the history of the women’s event and only the fourth New Zealander to win an Olympic medal in a field event, after Yvette Williams, Valerie Adams and Tom Walsh.
What followed was harder. An Achilles tendon injury that flared in March 2021 cost her the Tokyo Olympics, then cost her the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, and turned several seasons into a long argument with her own body. She was open at the time about not knowing whether she would get back. The comeback ran through that 2024 world indoor silver, a sixth place at the Paris Olympics with 4.70m, and a European season this year that included a 4.80m second placing in Budapest a fortnight before the Games. This is her first major championship gold.
Ayris, at 25, has now won bronze at two Commonwealth Games in a row, having taken third at Birmingham four years ago when McCartney was absent. She came into Glasgow off a career-best Diamond League silver in Rabat and a personal best set earlier this year. Like McCartney, she learned the event at the Takapuna club under coach Jeremy McColl, which means both of Saturday morning’s New Zealand medals trace back to the same suburban runway.
The third New Zealander in the final was Olivia McTaggart, whose brother Cameron won weightlifting silver in Glasgow earlier in the programme. Fielding three of the seven vaulters in a Commonwealth final is unusual depth for a country of five million in an event that needs specialist coaching, a specialist pit and years of patience.
The pole vault was not the only New Zealand gold of the morning. Para-cyclist Devon Briggs won the 1km C1-3 time trial at the velodrome and set a Commonwealth Games record doing it. Briggs, from Cambridge, was born with severe clubfeet and has had 19 surgeries. Elsewhere on the track it was a rougher session. Olympic sprint champion Ellesse Andrews was knocked out of the individual sprint in straight rides by Welsh rider Emma Finucane in the quarter-finals, a day after the New Zealand team sprint went out in qualifying. Bryony Botha was handed an unexpected place in the 4000m individual pursuit final after two Australian riders were disqualified, one for shoulder strapping that officials said altered her shape and one for a non-compliant helmet, but was beaten by Scotland’s Erin Boothman.
The results lift New Zealand to seven gold, 10 silver and eight bronze in Glasgow, sitting sixth on the medal table from a team of 112 athletes across 10 sports. That is a strong return from the smallest New Zealand Commonwealth Games team in 44 years, sent to a deliberately slimmed-down Games with a much shorter sport programme than Birmingham had. The Silver Ferns play England in the netball semi-final, and the Games close on 2 August.
Did you catch McCartney’s winning vault, or were you still asleep at that hour? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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