Russia's Yelena Isinbayeva will break through the five-metre mark in the women's pole vault discipline at or before the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, said Shi Meichuang, national coach of China's female pole vault squad, at the Hong Kong Sports Institute in Sha Tin yesterday.
Shi has spent the past week in the SAR with two stars of his national squad - Gao Shuying and Li Yiwei - partly for training and partly to give a demonstration in pole vaulting skills to the growing number of local enthusiasts.
Gao, 26, the Asian women's record holder with a personal best vault of 4.52m, put on an Olympic-style performance for the 30 or so local athletes attending, and also for Hong Kong's head athletics coach Kevin Ankrom.
'When I've been to track and field meets in the Asia region I've noticed that the women's pole vault discipline has been rather weak,' said Ankrom. 'We've got athletes here who are possibly not achieving their full potential in their main sport, but who are athletically capable of switching to the pole vault, so I've encouraged some of those girls to give it a try.
'It takes a little time but we're getting there,' he said. 'It takes two years to learn how to pole vault properly, but it's the younger athletes that take up the sport as a result of seeing these girls perform that we really want to target.'
Shi said that children who had first trained in gymnastics often made the best pole vaulters. He also said that his squad were training hard to maintain their ranking as the number-one team in Asia, and that he expected them to be able to pose a reasonable challenge to the Russians in 2008.