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Rogowska: the latest Pole to vault to the top
Thursday 12 May 2005
With an Olympic bronze and a European Indoor silver medals already secured, Anna Rogowska is in the process of becoming the undisputed number two in the women’s Pole Vault. Janus Rozum met with the 23-year-old European who foresees a 5-metre clearance in her near future.
The willing to prove that as a nation they are the ones blazing the trail for others, willingly undertaking new challenges may be considered as one of the main strengths of the Polish. And this is particularly true for Polish women, proud of Krystyna Chojnowska-Liskiewicz - the first female sailor to circumnavigate the world - or Wanda Rutkiewicz - the first European to reach the top of Mount Everest.
When Halina Konopacka won the Discus Throw gold medal at the Amsterdam 1928 Olympic Games, the first edition of the modern era allowing women to take part, it marked the beginning of a beautiful story of women athletics in Poland, where the national championships were first held 6 years earlier (one year sooner than the US)!
It is not a surprise to see how nowadays Polish women approve of the introduction of new events in the athletics programme. In the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games 17-year-old Kamila Skolimowska became the first Olympic champion in the women’s Hammer Throw.
In the still growing but highly competitive Pole Vault event there have been two leading figures in the past couple of years: Svetlana Feofanova and Yelena Isinbayeva, both from Russia. However, behind them two representatives of Poland are rapidly catching up and starting to regularly claim international medals. Indeed Monika Pyrek and Anna Rogowska battled it out for bronze at last year’s Olympic Games in Athens and the two Poles also returned from the Madrid European Indoor Championships with a medal each, silver for Rogowska and bronze for Pyrek.
Now while Pyrek’s world class status is reckoned with since she won silver at the IAAF World Junior Championships in Annecy 1998, it wasn’t until shortly before the Athens contest that Rogowska was truly noticed.
Rogowska was born on 21 March 1981 in Gdynia, part of the so called Triple City (three big cities, lying close to each other: Gdansk, Sopot and Gdynia). Her parents - her mother is a post office clerk and her father is a device restorer in a nursery school - were never really into sport and although her brother did not dislike the odd sport competition he never signed in for any sport club of any sort.
On the other hand, young Anna was keen to take part in as many school competitions as possible with a little preference for basketball and handball. At the age of 13, she used to run long distance and cross country races and she would inevitable finish among the top three. Every year the highlight of her running season would be the traditional 1 Mile run along the beaches of the Baltic sea. Today Rogowska admits that she never thought she might be so successful at running; that the force that drove her to the finish line was her hatred to lose whatever the competition.
Her athletics career took a turn when she turned 14 and her physical education teacher decided to sign her to the nearby athletics club: MTS Junior Sopot. There she specialised in hurdling events under the guidance of Ewa Kiczela, herself a hurdles specialist. While young Anna was amassing success after success in her three years as a sprint hurdler, women’s Pole Vault was dramatically gaining popularity in Triple City.
A 5.45m jumper, 22-year-old Przemyslaw Gurin was called upon to introduce young athletes with the basics of this event. It is Przemyslaw who taught 16-year-old Anna how to jump. She recalls that after two weeks of “fun with the poleâ€Â