After a 22-meet season that included a win over the greatest vaulter in history, Australia’s pole vault mainstay is plotting a night of lights, AC/DC and a tailwind that always arrives..
After a bronze medal at the 2025 World Championships and before the 2026 season began, Kurtis Marschall and his coach sat down with a calendar and a blunt brief. With no world championships or Olympics on the schedule, only a Commonwealth Games, Marschall saw a year to cash in.
“I really just wanted to make as much money as possible, do as many competitions as possible, travel to as many places as we can, and just say yes to everything.”
Kurtis Marschall
They pencilled in 24 meets and cut two. From the day he left Australia on 1 June, Marschall, 29, competed roughly once a week, sometimes twice, for three and a half months. He made 10 Diamond League appearances, more, he believes, than any other Australian this year, and averaged 5.87 metres across the season.
The volume produced the best year of his career: a first Diamond League win, taken from Mondo Duplantis in front of his home crowd in Stockholm; a third straight Commonwealth Games title; a first six-metre clearance outdoors. It has also left him with a bigger idea, one involving the world record holder, a stadium in Perth and a sea breeze with impeccable timing.
“It all kind of just turns into a bit of a blur,” said Marschall, home in Perth and only now beginning to sort through it.
The season was partly commercial and partly a test of durability. Next year brings a world championships, the year after an Olympics, and those seasons will be about peaking on a single night. This one was about the average. Marschall likes to say you can build a career jumping around 5.80 metres. He dipped below that once all year, and won that meet anyway.
“The body being in one piece at the end of that is probably the biggest success out of the whole thing,” he said.
He credits a philosophy inherited from his former coach Paul Burgess, himself a six-metre vaulter: less is more. When Declan Carruthers, a former Perth vaulter, took over this year, he resisted the new-coach urge to tear things up. “A lot of people change coaches and you go backwards for a year,” Marschall said. Carruthers kept the foundation, refined the mechanics and travelled with him all season, adjusting training as the flights and meets stacked up.
He also minded the poles, which is no small job. Poles can’t go on trains. They fly only on airlines with open cargo holds, typically budget carriers like Ryanair, EasyJet and Eurowings, and only by prior arrangement. “It’s a logistical nightmare, mate,” Marschall said.
When a check-in agent refuses them, he has a line ready: “How do you think they got here?” Then he produces a bag tag from the same airline. It usually works. When it didn’t this season, poles travelled separately, swaddled in bubble wrap. Often Carruthers simply drove them between meets while Marschall rested his legs on a train.
The defining moment came early. On 7 June in Stockholm, Marschall cleared 5.90m on his final attempt at the height, while Duplantis, chasing a world record before his home crowd, stopped at 5.80. It was the Swede’s first loss since July 2023, ending a 40-meet winning streak.
“It was a bit of a bittersweet moment, beating him in front of his home crowd and in front of all his family and friends,” Marschall said. “But it was still a Diamond League win, and I jumped massive and out of my skin in quite tricky conditions. That’s going to be my first ever Diamond League win forever.”
He backed it up in Oslo on a rough day. “I was the only guy to clear 5.80,” he said. “Everyone else was 5.70s.” In July, in Budapest, he cleared six metres outdoors for the first time. On 1 August, in a cold Glasgow, he became the first man to win three Commonwealth pole vault titles, breaking Steve Hooker’s Games record with 5.85m.
But the jump he is proudest of came at the very end, back in Budapest at the inaugural Ultimate Championship. Running low on legs, he cleared 5.60m, missed at 5.80m and watched the rest of the field go over. In last place, he passed to 5.95m and missed again. His final attempt went clear, and he finished fourth in the first outdoor competition in which five men cleared 5.95m or higher.
“I’m very proud that I was able to, against the odds, on third attempt, last attempt, clear that 95,” he said.
The men’s pole vault circuit is a small travelling village, and Marschall saw most of its residents every week. “I’d hate to be enemies with any of them,” he said. Six men cleared six metres this season. Duplantis, whose world record now stands at 6.31m, has dragged the event into the spotlight and everyone else upward with him.
Marschall is also thinking about what comes after. Behind him and fellow Perth vaulter Nina Kennedy, the Paris Olympic champion, Australia’s crop of young vaulters is thin. And once Duplantis’s generation retires, “post-LA, post-Brizzy,” the event could slip into a lull.
So he wants to make the most of the friendships while they last.
“Everyone’s always begging me to come down to Australia,” he said, “but there’s no real reason.”
“We’ve got the Maurie Plant Meet, but it’s not a great place to vault. It’s cold, it could be tough conditions.
Marschall’s answer is the stadium where he trains. At the WA Athletics Stadium, the Fremantle Doctor, Perth’s afternoon sea breeze, arrives almost on the clock, and the grandstand funnels it into a dead-straight tailwind down the runway. The track is a double-laid Mondo surface, and quick.
“If the boys want to come down, I want a world-class field. I want to put it somewhere where I can guarantee good conditions.”
Kurtis Marschall
“It’s honestly the perfect place to jump,” he said. “You never know, a few guys might jump over six metres here in Perth, which would be unbelievable.”
Duplantis is the headliner, and Marschall suspects he is the one rival Duplantis would fly 24 hours for. He was a guest at Duplantis’s wedding this year and has spent long stretches living at his house in Europe. Of Stockholm, he said: “If there was going to be anyone that beat him for the first time in three years, I think he was happy that it was me.”
The pitch is as much the country as the competition: an after-party at a pub, the beach, a round of golf. “He would absolutely love it down here,” Marschall said, “and I think all the boys would.”
He has thought hard about the show. He has vaulted off boardwalks into a lake, in town squares and inside train stations, and still believes nothing beats a stadium at night. He wants a vault-only meet under lights: couches for the athletes, a DJ, a walk-up song for every vaulter, the house lights dropped for each jump, live interviews off the mat, crosses to the coaches, and a commentator who can explain grip and pole bend to a crowd seeing it up close for the first time.
He is careful not to push. Duplantis withdrew from the Diamond League final with tightness in his leg, and 2027 brings a world championships before the Los Angeles Olympics. “I don’t want to put any pressure on him,” Marschall said, “but we’ve got things in place which means that we should be able to lure him down.”
He has already chosen his own walk-up music. He has never vaulted to AC/DC, but a short drive from Fremantle, where Bon Scott grew up, it feels overdue.
“A bit of Hells Bells to get us going,” he said, “and then maybe Highway to Hell.”
The runway in Perth, as it happens, is already Mondo. Now Marschall just needs the other one.
