Coronavirus pandemic deferred Charlotte 49ers pole vaulter Keon Howe’s Olympic dream
When Keon Howe is at his best, he soars through the air, trusting a 16-foot fiberglass pole to catapult him to nearly the height of a two-story building.
He was across the country in New Mexico, on March 12, when he was abruptly grounded.
Howe, a star pole vaulter for the Charlotte 49ers with Olympic aspirations, knew the NCAA Indoor Championships had already banned spectators due to coronavirus concerns. But less than 24 hours before he was about to compete, Howe began to have a love-hate relationship with his phone.
“Every time I looked, the news just kept getting worse and worse,” Howe said.
He couldn’t help looking, though.
And then, there the news was: The NCAA had canceled everything. March Madness’s vanishing got most of the headlines, but track’s indoor championships were canceled, too, as was track’s entire outdoor season, and baseball and softball and every other spring collegiate sport.
And that was only the beginning. Howe is a monstrously good pole vaulter at the college level — he entered eight meets this season and won seven. Even against stiffer competition, he is strong enough to have a reasonable shot at making the U.S. Olympic Trials and an outside shot at the U.S. Olympic team. A redshirt senior, he spent five years honing his craft with the 49ers in anticipation of this summer.
“I feel like I’ve been training for this moment for all my life,” Howe said.
And now, that dream is deferred. Tuesday, the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo got moved to 2021 due to the fallout from COVID-19, resetting the calendar for tens of thousands of Olympic hopefuls around the world.
For Howe, a former track and field (and band!) standout at Mallard Creek, the result has been a mishmash of conflicting information. There are also several big questions he can’t answer right now as he tries to stay in shape by doing push-ups at his parents’ home in Charlotte.
Would he be able to return to Charlotte for a sixth year if he wanted to? Since he’s graduating in May with a math major — that commencement ceremony is also postponed — should he just move on with his life? And could this delay actually help his Olympic chances?
An Olympic-sized dream
If you’ve ever watched pole vaulting up close, you probably thought one thing to yourself: That’s scary.
And it is. Bob Olesen, the Charlotte 49ers’ head track and field coach, said Howe is a talented athlete who also has “the confidence necessary to run full speed and jump onto a fiberglass pole, invert upside down, and fly over a crossbar 18 feet above the ground.”
Or, as Howe said when I asked him what that felt like: “It feels exactly the way it looks. You’re being launched into the air by a giant stick.”
“I’m an adrenaline junkie,” he added, “and I’m very competitive. So the pole vault matches both of those things perfectly. When I found something that was both dangerous, and rewarding, I knew that that was definitely my sport.”
At Mallard Creek, Howe was North Carolina’s track athlete of the year in 2015 after winning state titles in the pole vault and high jump. He has continued to occasionally high-jump in college, but has concentrated most of his efforts in the pole vault.
Howe (6-foot-2, 187 pounds) said pole vaulting is all about the setup. You must have enough speed and strength to jam the pole into the ground in exactly the right way, called “loading the pole.”
“By the time the pole throws you in the air, everything is already predetermined,” Howe said. “You can relax and just enjoy the ride at that point.”
Howe has broken his own school records several times this season and had the best vault of his career a month ago in Boston (5.47 meters, which equates to almost 18 feet). He will need to add about nine inches to that career best to automatically qualify for the U.S. Olympic Trials in 2021.
“That’s definitely in his reach,” Olesen said. From there, Howe would need to finish in the top three to make the Olympic team that will represent the U.S. in Tokyo sometime next year.
A sixth year with 49ers?
An optimist by nature, Howe is trying to find the silver lining in this life on pause we are all living. Maybe another year of training for the Olympics was what he needed. “It will give me a bigger chance, a better chance,” he said of the delay.
At age 23, he has also decided he wants to return to the Charlotte campus for a sixth year if that can be worked out at the NCAA, Conference USA and school levels. Howe would like to become a professional track athlete, but poles cost at least $800 apiece and he will sometimes use seven different ones in a single meet.
“Plus,” Howe said, “you outgrow them like shoes.” All of Howe’s poles are currently supplied by the 49ers.
For Howe to return, he would probably need to go to graduate school at Charlotte. All of it will require a different rhythm. But Howe is used to that. A gifted percussionist, he returned to Mallard Creek as a part-time drum line instructor for several years during his collegiate career until he couldn’t find enough hours in the day to do everything.
Now it’s the opposite: He’s healthy, rested and has all sorts of time on his hands, except all of his poles are locked in Charlotte’s closed track facility.
Howe knows that, one day, he will soar again. But it’s going to be awhile.
This story was originally published March 27, 2020 at 1:47 PM.
