Column by Brendan Ferrer | Hostility tribe
Ten months ago, Nina Kennedy was in the commentary box in Tokyo, talking about a world title she was supposed to defend. On Friday night in Monaco, she jumped 4.95 metres, the highest jump of her life, an Oceania and Australian record, and a height that only four women in history have been able to achieve.
The number is worth a moment. With a distance of 4.95m, Kennedy now sits fifth on the all-time list, equal with her old sparring partner Katie Moon, and behind only the four members of the sport’s most exclusive club: world record holder Yelena Isinbaeva (5.06m), Jane Suhr (5.03m), Angelika Sidorova (5.01m) and Sandy Morris (5.00m), the only woman ever to clear the five-metre distance. No one on the planet, in any competition, has been able to jump higher in about five years.
The manner of the matter was almost contemptuous. Kennedy passed each bar from 4.52m to 4.82m without missing a beat. After failing once at 4.87 metres, with the competition already won, she cleared her remaining attempts and cleared the bar straight to 4.95 metres. During the first time. American Amanda Mull, the closest competitor, took second place with a distance of 4.72 metres, a difference of 23 cm. Moon, the woman Kennedy shared the 2023 world title with in Budapest, cleared 4.62 meters to equal fifth. Then, with nothing left to win, Kennedy took three swings at the same five-metre hurdle.
She didn’t get it. She doesn’t look worried.
“I honestly believe I can jump 5 metres,” she said afterwards, adding that Monaco, with its fast runway and raucous crowd at the Stade Louis II, had always been a happy hunting ground.
What makes a jump great isn’t so much the height as the route to it. Kennedy 2025 barely happened. After her victory in Paris in August 2024, when her first attempt at a 4.90m clearance made her the first Australian woman to win an Olympic gold medal in a field event, her body simply collapsed. Three tears in his left hamstring within six weeks at the beginning of 2025. Surgery in April. The rehabilitation process took five months, nearly double the original timeline. She battled back to the brink of the world championship in Tokyo, but strained her leg again in one of her final training sessions and withdrew a week after defending her title. “I really liked it,” she wrote at the time, but then went to Tokyo anyway, calling the event for Channel Nine while someone else jumped in for her title.
That she has returned not just to her old form, but four centimeters beyond it, her previous best being an Australian record of 4.91m from Zurich in 2023, tells you everything about the 29-year-old from Busselton. This is an athlete whose entire career has been a cycle of breaking and rebuilding: the junior world record at 17, the lack of height in Beijing, the lost years of stress fractures and depression, and the Commonwealth medals and world and Olympic gold medals that followed. Injuries were never a break for Kennedy’s story. They are the story, and the jumping is what you do in spite of them.
The night in Monaco was a perfect stage for that. Emmanuel Wanyonyi broke Noah Ngenyi’s 27-year-old world record in the 1000 metres, clocking 2:11.83 minutes. Mondo Duplantis, now a Monaco local, set a meet record of 6.07m in the men’s pole vault exhibition as fellow West Australian Curtis Marshall finished third with 5.85m, and the two workers in the sand celebrated together with Kennedy’s record. It turns out that Perth remains the center of the dome universe.
Timing is the delicious part. The Commonwealth Games open in Glasgow in less than two weeks, with Kennedy defending the title she won in Birmingham in 2022, arriving as the best female vaulter on Earth with a declared conviction that the five-metre is coming. Only four women were ever there. On Friday’s evidence is the name of a fifth relative who will join them and will be written on an Australian passport.
