EVER SINCE 2016 when he reigned as prep pole vaulting’s No. 1 All-America out of Park Hill High in Kansas City, Chris Nilsen has been a force in the event.
The NCAA indoor champ as a South Dakota frosh in ‘17, he won NCAA outdoor crowns in 2018 and ‘19 and turned back one Mondo Duplantis for the title in the latter year with a 19-6¼ (5.95) clearance.
You probably know the rest of the story: Olympic silver in ‘21, silver at the ‘22 Worlds, bronze in ‘23. His 19-10¼i (6.05) AR jump in March of ‘22 lifted Nilsen way up the all-time list and he is still No. 10 on that exalted compilation today.
This season, at 28, he is essaying a return from a hiccup in his run of consistently remarkable performance.
A year ago Nilsen rolled fast down the runway with a 19-8½i (6.01) win in Caen, France, his ’25 international opener. Then three weeks later in the course of winning his third USATF Indoor title, came a setback.
“I broke my hand at the U.S. Championships,” he says, “and it’s kind of a freak thing that happens every once in a while. Unfortunately, those poles are, uh — how do you describe it? Unpredictable.”
There went Nilsen’s chance to upgrade from his World Indoor bronze of ‘22. “That is just how the cookie crumbles, I guess.”
His hand healed in time for outdoor and he went over 19-5 (5.92) twice in early June. ‘25, though, turned out to be one of those years, the injury-plagued kind Nilsen had never before experienced in 14 years of vaulting.
He had pushed through a portent of trouble. “Early in the outdoor season, I started feeling kind of a pinching feeling in my adductor/groin area, and unfortunately, I irresponsibly treated it like a used car, where you see the check engine light pop on and you just kind of ignore it and hope it goes away.”
That didn’t work out so well, he admits. “At the Täby Street Vault the day before the Stockholm Diamond League, I tore my adductor, which is that muscle/tendon that runs from the inside of your knee up to your groin. It attaches to your pelvic bone, and it controls your internal rotation of your leg. I tore that on my left side. That kind of shut down my outdoor season in mid-June.”
A “full approach” course of medical treatment healed the tendon by mid-October yet Nilsen had missed outdoor USAs and the Worlds in Tokyo.
Fast-forward to the here and now of the third week of January. “I leave Sunday for France,” Nilsen says, “and the first meet over there is the Perch’Xtrem over in Caen.” So back to the scene of his ‘25 seasonal best.
Heading into ‘26, Nilsen assesses, “All my numbers look great. I’m pole vaulting high in practice, I’m running fast on the track, and I’m lifting pretty heavy in the weight room. On the training side of things, everything is going extremely well. Now it’s just about remaining healthy and staying consistent over those 5.80 [19-¼] bars, try to get myself back into that top 3 position at every meet that I like to shoot for.”
Nilsen and Derek Miles — his coach since college days and the ‘08 Olympic bronze medalist at age 35 — have made just one adjustment from their ‘24–25 program. They have backed away from an effort to hold Nilsen’s weight down. After considered analysis, coach and vaulter decided that earlier training shift had contributed to the Paris Olympics Q-round failure that has been his only miss in a major since 2021.
“I was in this weird head space,” he says, “to where I wanted to try to be as light as I possibly could weight-wise. And it just doesn’t work. And the math doesn’t really work either.
“If you’re running 10 meters per second down the runway and you’re 215lbs, versus if you’re running 10 meters per second down the runway but you’re 200lbs-even, you’re able to generate a lot more force and a lot more kinetic energy into that takeoff.
“I kinda had a little bit of a hiccup there trying to get down to a weight that I deemed good. But the science doesn’t necessarily prove that or back it, so, I had a little bit of a tough time.”
Nilsen’s target weight is back up to 215 (97kg) — not an easy reach. He finds it much easier to shed weight than pack it on.
This past December, he says, “I would go to sleep at about 213, 214 and I’d think, ‘OK, good. We’re trending in the right direction.” Then I’d wake up again and it’d be 209.”
A stock joke from Coach Miles has been, “I think you should go eat a Twinkie.”
Nilsen is not biting on the junk snack idea, but he intends to jump a bit heavier and consistently high in ‘26.
