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Can you use the Film Room for pole vault?

Partly, and the part it cannot do is most of the vault, which is worth knowing before you rely on it.

The event picker says "High jump / vault", so the honest version of this answer has to start with what that actually means. The analyser reads the athlete's body. It does not read the pole.

What it can see

Picking the high jump and vault setting gets you three measurements from a side-on clip: how far the hips rise as a share of the athlete's height, the takeoff angle, and knee fold and extension. Those are real numbers about a real takeoff, and they are worth having for the plant: a vault takeoff is still a takeoff, and an athlete who is collapsing at the plant will show it there.

The approach is the other half, and for that the sprint setting is more useful than the vault one. A vault run-up is sprinting with an awkward object in your hands, and the sprint setting will tell you whether the athlete is braking on the last few steps, whether the trunk is folding, and what the knee fold looks like when they are carrying a pole. Two clips of the same attempt, analysed under two settings, will tell you more than either alone.

What it cannot see, which is most of a vault

• The pole itself: grip height, how much it bends, when it starts to bend, and whether it is the right stiffness for the athlete.
• Plant timing relative to the takeoff foot, which is the thing most vaults are actually won and lost on.
• Everything after takeoff: the swing, the rockback, the turn and the push off the top.
• The box, the standards, and the bar.

That is not a short list, and it is not a roadmap either. This is a pose analyser working from one phone camera, and the parts of a vault it misses are the parts a coach's eye and a slow-motion replay are already good at.

One thing to watch out for

One thing to know about the drills. The event's list is high jump drills (short-approach scissors over a low bar, five-step curve runs with no bar), and both are built around a curved approach, which a vaulter does not run. The app will hand them to you: it treats a takeoff angle under about 30 degrees, or hips that rise less than about 15 per cent of body height, as faults worth a drill. Those floors sit so far below what a real clearance produces that on a vault they mostly catch a failed attempt or a clip that cut off the flight. When they do fire, read what arrives as high jump drills, because that is what they are.

So: useful for the run-up and the takeoff, blind to the pole. If a vault coach wants a tool for grip height and pole selection, this is not it, and no amount of pointing a phone at the runway will make it one.

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