According to Nina Kennedy, she fell into pole vault by accident.
As she prepares for her second Olympics, the 27-year-old remembers how she got involved with the sport.
"I did little athletics and I loved little athletics. I fell in love with it," she told ESPN.
"Steve Hooker had won the [pole vault gold medal at the] 2008 Olympics in Beijing and in Western Australia and Perth, it was a very big hype."
It was a big deal because Hooker had moved from Melbourne to Perth to train under Alex Parnov a few years before his Games triumph. With an Olympic gold to go along with his Commonwealth Games and World Cup gold medals, Australian pole vault had a new hero for kids to look up to and there was more attention on the sport than usual.
"Maybe six months after that, I got sent a letter in the mail saying do you want to come try pole vault and they'd been kind of talent digging at some little athletics event and I got chosen," Kennedy explained.
An 11-year-old Kennedy had been sprinting, hurdling, and long jumping, as well as playing netball, tennis, and gymnastics. She was fast, athletic and coordinated.
"I had this really great skill set which really just worked for the pole vault."
Out of 30 kids invited to try the sport, three were selected. She was one of them. On reflection, Kennedy's journey to pole vault wasn't an accident so much as a series of opportune moments; dominoes cascading in a line.
"I kind of always wanted to go to the Olympics in something," Kennedy admitted, throwing around sports like gymnastics, hockey and athletics as potential options. She reminisced about classroom Olympic days in primary school and the memory of two thick VHS tapes of the Sydney 2000 Olympics watched around the same age, stoking her curiosity and ambitions.
"Then when this pole vault thing came along, it was like 'Oh, Steve Hooker's a gold medallist and I basically train in the same group as Steve'.
"It was a pathway that I saw that was quite realistic and I think in athletics the pathway to get to the top isn't as carved out as maybe more popular sports like AFL, like this is what you do to get to the top.
"Whereas athletics, it's not really like that so I saw this opportunity and started competing and I was good. I think I just had a knack for the sport."
Ultimately her "knack" for pole vault allowed her to live out her Olympic dreams, making her Games debut at Tokyo 2020.
Unfortunately, it was eventful in the worst possible way. Her lead-up was hampered by injuries and the pandemic made its presence felt beyond the empty stands.
Kennedy was placed into isolation after sharing a training venue with American pole vaulter, Sam Kendricks, who tested positive for COVID-19. It challenged her mentality and resilience.
While she was eventually allowed to compete, the culmination of all these moments meant she was unable to clear 4.55m and did not make it beyond the qualifying round.
"I've always kind of believed that your biggest growth comes from your darkest or your worst times so it's no surprise that Tokyo was such a struggle," Kennedy said.
"I think getting removed from the village and being in that hotel, it was really isolating and that taught me a lot about myself and I think what I learnt most was the values I hold and how I got from being in a really not ideal situation to out of that and still competing and still showing up.
"I learnt that in your dark times, you do have to pull on your values. So that was a really nice lesson and my values really did shine through in those two weeks. It was hard, I'm not grateful for it, but I'm glad it happened."
Despite the unfortunate events of her debut Olympics, Kennedy always seemed destined for the biggest stage, announcing herself to Australian athletics in 2012 when she came second at the senior national championships at age 14.
It's the kind of result that meant Kennedy's name was circled and underlined from a young age.
"I think if anything, it just highlighted that I had this talent and I had a bucket load of potential and it probably just added, I don't like to use the word pressure, but I guess it just added a bit of pressure and expectation on myself at a really young age."
"But my journey has been what it's been and it's led me to this point and I wouldn't be the athlete I am today without that past experience."
After such a statement result so early on in her career, Kennedy continued to progress through the ranks making junior national teams, competing at world championships, increasing her personal best, and setting records to boot.
At 18, in her first senior team and a year before the Rio Olympics, Kennedy cleared a height which would have seen her qualify for the Games. There was an assumption that an Olympic debut was just around the corner. All she had to do was repeat the feat in qualifying. But as she told the Hard Yarns podcast, being "young" and "dumb" meant that when it came to crunch time, she didn't match those efforts and didn't qualify for Rio.
Looking back, Kennedy can pinpoint what happened in the leadup to Rio and what needed to change for her to reach her potential.
"I think the first half of my career was very much like I was relying on talent and kind of coasting through and I definitely think since I left school that's where I really made a conscious decision of yeah this is what I want to do and I really enjoy this and I want to see how far I can take it," she told ESPN.
That involved complementing her natural talent with improving the things she could control, prioritising sleep, diet, and exercise. It also required evaluating and rejigging her relationship with her mind and her own beliefs system, what she called a "self-development journey".
"I like to describe it as pole vault exposes the mental demons or the mental struggles you might be feeling," Kennedy said.
"So if I had a really s--- day at school, uni, or I'm stressed, stuff's going on at home or with my boyfriend, if you get to pole vault practise and you're not in a good mindset, you're not doing a good pole vault."
"Pole vault for me is about being calm and being in my body and just executing what I need to."
She needed to learn not only how to work through the troubles that plague all of us in order to get the best out of herself, she also needed to challenge some limiting beliefs.
In an individual sport which requires athletes to be their own biggest cheerleader, Kennedy needed to believe, truly and deeply, that she was good enough to be at the very top of the sport. It's a process that's been long winded has become easier as she has matured and spent more time in the sport.
Once your mind is in order, you then need to sort out your body and the physicality of a sport like pole vault. It is one of the most unique Olympic sports on the schedule.
Initially a practical way to jump over enemy walls or over natural landmarks, the evolution of the sport is remarkable. Black and white vision of the pole vault from the Olympics of the early 1900s featured men -- women's pole vault was not introduced to the Olympics until Sydney 2000 -- using large wooden poles to jump over the bar and into a pit of sand, hence why the mat athletes land on today is still called the pit. The advancements in equipment, technique, and physicality have seen the world record heights skyrocket.
It's a sport that requires an athlete to be many things at once. Fast like a sprinter to generate energy and power. Strong enough to carry the pole while running full tilt and hoist your body up. Flexible and spatially aware like a gymnast to twist and pike and evade the bar while landing in the pit.
For an action that only takes a matter of seconds, there are so many moving parts that need to be coordinated and executed at the right time in the right order, not only with their bodies but with the pole, which also requires careful selection and trust.
Watching a vault in slow motion highlights all these intricacies and just how difficult a sport it is.
The general idea of the sport hasn't changed though. "You're flinging yourself up in the air and it's dangerous," Kennedy said.
Yet pole vaulters make it look effortless, a skill which disguises just how taxing the sport is on the body.
"I think people think that I train twice a day all year round and it's hustling and grinding but we're in such a high impact sport that you can only train a few times a week," Kennedy revealed.
"Your body just can't withstand that power and that force that's going through it."
Naturally because of this, injuries pop up. Quad, hamstring, glute, calf, abductor, and back issues, as well as mental health challenges, have all tested Kennedy's resilience throughout the years.
Over the last two years, she must have felt a sense of déjà vu as she contended with stress fractures in her back.
"I think it's a whole factor of things. It's the shape of my spine, the event that I do, the weaknesses in my body, the pressure of you running in, full pelt, and jumping against an object. Something's going to give and unfortunately, for me, that is a part of my spine," she said.
At the end of 2022 she took some time off to recover, not vaulting for months. Upon her return in 2023, she enjoyed arguably her most successful year to date, hitting personal bests, setting the national record of 4.91m - "I want to set it so high that no one ever breaks it," she said with a laugh - and taking home a world championship gold medal.
In a weird way, based on those highs after the lows, she is hoping history repeats after the stress fractures were reaggravated at the back end of 2023 which required more time off to start 2024. She didn't jump for four months, allowing her body and mind to rest ahead of the Olympics.
When asked about how her body was doing about six weeks out from the Games, Kennedy was candid as ever.
"It's not good but it's not bad is the most accurate answer," she said with a laugh.
"Not many people are rocking up to the Olympics 100% physically healthy or even mentally healthy, there's [always] something going on."
She navigated the final weeks before the Olympics with aplomb, picking up Diamond League wins in Monaco and London.
And now she is experiencing a proper Olympics and relishing the prospect of another opportunity to compete. Moreover, she will enter her event as the reigning world champion, an honour she shares with American Katie Moon after they shared the gold medal at the world championships in 2023.
While the women's decision sparked some controversy, Kennedy doesn't regret it for a moment.
"I never once second guessed [it] in that moment, it just felt so right. And I didn't even ask my coaches, I didn't even ask them, which is crazy, but it was like, this is what I'm doing and it feels right."
While there won't be any sharing this time around should she vault the same height as one of her peers, a medal feels more than possible for Kennedy. And while her name will forever be in the Australian athletics history books, there is more history to be written yet.