Yelena Isinbayeva is the greatest female pole vaulter ever. She won the 2004 and 2008 Olympic Gold Medal and has twice been the IAAF’s Female Athlete of the Year. In 2005, she became the first woman to clear five metres and is the current world record holder. Isinbayeva is also an avid reader of Russian history and a collector of dolphins – both model and real.

 

Isinbayeva was born in Volgograd, Russia in 1982. From the age of five, she trained as a gymnast. However, she quit the sport when she was 15 because at 1.74 metres she was too tall. She loved competition and switched to pole vaulting. Her first big competition was the 1998 World Junior Championships, where she finished ten centimeters outside the medals.

 

Isinbayeva showed her true potential in 1999 at the World Youth Games in Poland. She cleared 4.10m to take her very first gold medal. She would improve by nearly one metre over the next decade. In 2000, she won gold again at the Youth Games and the European Junior Championships

 

In 2003, Yelena burst onto the world stage when she broke the world record, clearing 4.82m at a meeting in England. She built up an intense rivalry with her compatriot Svetlana Feofanova. Going into the 2004 Olympics, Feofanova was world record holder. Isinbayeva won gold and reclaimed the world record. She plans to compete until the World Championships in Moscow in 2013.