Who set a 5.00 m pole vault world record at the London Athletics Meet in 2005?

Yelena Isinbaeva set the 5.00 m pole vault world record at the London Athletics Meet in 2005. She cleared the height on 22 July at Crystal Palace, becoming the first woman to vault five metres in an officially recognized outdoor competition.

The achievement came after Isinbaeva had already raised the record to 4.96 m earlier in the same London competition. She then successfully attempted 5.00 m, adding four centimetres and reaching a barrier that had long been regarded as the women’s pole vault equivalent of a historic threshold. She broke the world record again several weeks later by clearing 5.01 m at the 2005 World Championships in Helsinki.

The mark was one step in an extraordinary progression. Isinbaeva eventually set the outdoor world record at 5.06 m in Zürich in 2009, and that mark remains the recognized outdoor record. Anna Rogowska, Jenn Suhr and Sandi Morris were all elite vaulters, but none set this particular London record.