this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2024
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Blowing past the suggestion to highlight the cracks in hopes of a magic compound that makes them last forever seems naive as hell.
Seeing the poles failing sounds extremely valuable.
I'm sorry but poles shattering sending shrapnel all over the place is not valuable, it's dangerous.
If they could be replaced with a material that's similarly springy but doesn't shatter but degrades in a safe manner as faults accumulate that'd be a definitive improvement.
Identifying damaged poles keep poles from shattering by taking them out of circulation.
If they could keep poles from being capable of shattering, obviously that would be good. But they haven't done that or showed any particular indication that they have a realistic path to doing that. "We can do it on a flat surface and think it's almost as good as new" is worth exploring, but it's best case a very long way off and may never be possible in real world use cases at real world scale and pricing at all.
The highlighting micro-fractures is absolutely achievable in the near future, could absolutely be a new safety requirement in a reasonable time frame, and could very easily be understood and checked by both coaches and players prior to every jump.
Por que no los dos?
Only thing worse than a sense of safety is a false sense of safety.
Researching it is great. I said that.
But pumping up a solution decades in the future while dismissing a solution that's practical now doesn't make sense, and (per this coverage) isn't intended to resolve any of the other points of failure. It (might) mitigate some of the fracturing if given enough time in between to cure. It won't address manufacturing failures, it won't address any out of spec use, it won't address the fact that materials age over time (the reason that nearly all protective equipment has a finite lifespan before you should throw it away and replace it no matter how hard it was used). Giving a false sense of safety to a longer lifespan when it shouldn't have one regardless is potentially as harmful as giving people confidence that poles that aren't fractured aren't fractured.
I don't know that I agree - it's worth researching these things because if it works that's great and that paper proves that other people are working on the visibility problem.
Research is great.
But the article is dismissing a very practical solution and implying it's nonsense to pump up a pie in the sky longshot.
That's what the article says, they're hardly implying it's nonsense. Or are you saying that the self-healing is nonsense? There are examples of self-healing materials, like Roman concrete.
That's extremely dismissive, of something that appears to resolve the issue entirely.
Self healing materials with similar properties and requirements to pole vaulting poles don't exist. They might eventually, but we're not close. When the weight and flex requirements are that strict, and failure is that catastrophic, expecting a solution in the next 20 years is extremely optimistic, and that's ignoring costs entirely. The article should be discussing the actual real world solution far more.
It's far from my field, so I'll have to take your word on that!