The case for pole dancing in the Olympics

Humans are simple creatures. Since the dawn of spectator sports, we’ve wanted to watch muscular people fight and do flips. Today, TikTok-friendly high-drama sports like women’s gymnastics regularly dominate Olympic viewership on TV networks and streaming platforms. But watching artistic gymnastics isn’t the only way to see ultra-strong people do flips and splits.

Pole dancing — the erotic striptease-turned-sport that’s essentially sexy gymnastics on a stick — has all the makings of a perfect Olympic sport. The athleticism of pole performers, whether at a family-friendly competition or a strip club, is undeniable. Even the most basic pole moves are no joke: Getting off the ground at all is kind of like doing a pull up, a push up, a crunch, and an air squat all at once. At the highest level, pole athletes — yes, there are pole athletes — can perform several minutes worth of choreographed handstands, flips, tumbles, and other aerial tricks, all set to music. Sometimes, they do it in eight-inch stilettos. And just as gymnastics increases in difficulty over time, pole dancers get stronger, bendier, and more creative every year.

In the early 20th century, burlesque and striptease performers began incorporating poles into their routines. This was less for artistic reasons than functional ones — bars had tiny stages or no stage at all, and dancers needed something to hold onto. When Mary’s Club opened in Portland in 1954, it became the first bar to install brass poles onstage for strippers to incorporate into their performances. Strip clubs increasingly featured pole dancing, and dancers invented more tricks — climbing up the pole and performing splits on the ceiling, twerking upside-down, and plummeting back to the ground. 

Dancers generally practice and teach each other at the club, but in the early 2000s, the first pole studios opened in North America, Europe, and Australia, bringing the art of sensual movement on a vertical steel bar from strippers to hobbyists. Since then, pole dancing has seen a massive surge in popularity. Pole studios quickly spread across the world. Today, there are over 600 studios in the US alone, and thousands more across every continent excluding Antarctica. I, like many others, got swept into this world not through sex work, but Groupons advertising an intriguing alternative to pilates. I stuck with it long enough to become a professional pole instructor, and have taught microbiologists, sex workers, goth teens, and white-collar dads. 

Clearly, pole dancing has widespread appeal. It’s also globally practiced, visually engaging, and physically impressive, meeting several of the criteria for Olympic recognition. The International Pole Sports Federation (IPSF), led by cofounder Katie Coates, has been advocating for pole as an Olympic sport for 15 years. It created a 126-page rulebook from scratch and gathered 10,000 signatures on a 2010 petition to make pole dancing an Olympic sport. It even earned provisional recognition by the now-defunct Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) in 2017, once viewed as an auspicious step toward winning over the International Olympic Committee (IOC), whose formal recognition is a prerequisite to becoming an Olympic sport.

Yet even as Paris features new sports such as breaking, there’s no space for pole — not this year, nor any future games thus far. Even equestrian vaulting has locked in a 2032 comeback. What gives?

The fight for Olympic recognition

First, the boring answer: Gaining Olympic recognition involves a lot of hard, unpaid labor, and no one wants to do it. Athletes in movement practices like pole dancing already struggle to make a living doing their sport. (I lived off my pole instructor income alone for a couple months, and I don’t recommend it.) 

“If you’re a high level athlete, you want to focus on your training,” said Amy Bond, founder and CEO of Pole + Dance Studios, which operates several pole studios along the US west coast. (Disclosure: I teach at Pole + Dance Studios.) “You don’t want to focus your time on the administration and bureaucracy and red tape that goes into getting your sport into the Olympics.”

Pole’s Olympic push has largely been a one-woman operation, with Coates serving as an entrepreneur-diplomat-organizer-athlete at IPSF. “She’s one human trying to wear 15 hats,” Bond said. Even for a well-organized team of advocates, the work of getting a sport to the Olympics is Sisyphean at best. For example, the World DanceSport Federation, which organizes international breaking competitions, was first recognized by the IOC in 1997 — 27 years before its Olympic debut. Breaking won’t be included again in 2028. 

Pole got GAISF  “observer status” in 2017, giving the IPSF access to a network of international sports federations for support. This status theoretically brought it closer to being taken seriously by the IOC, but the GAISF dissolved in 2022, bringing pole back to the drawing board. 

“We never really got anywhere and we never got any support. I think they were just trying to placate us and shut us up,” Coates told Slate last month. “It broke my soul because it felt like I’d reached the summit only to find another, much tougher mountain in front of me.”

Looking at pole dancing next to other Olympic sports, the snub can feel ridiculous. Pole combines the jaw-dropping feats of gymnastics, the social media appeal of skateboarding, and the countercultural intrigue of breaking. Clara Pauchet, a French pole instructor, told Reuters, “When I see what it requires of the body, I don’t see the difference between gymnastics with parallel bars and a vertical bar. I think it really has its place.” 

But pole also brings something that the IOC may not be ready to handle: sexuality, and a lot of cultural baggage.

The sportification of pole dancing

Plenty of Olympic sports feature scantily-clad athletes. Female beach volleyball players often wear bikinis while competing, figure skaters perform in form-fitting, sheer-accented leotards, and French diver Jules Bouyer was wearing less than most pole dancers when his speedo bulge went viral this year.

But while revealing costumes are partially a vestige of pole’s roots, skin friction against metal is also what keeps athletes from sliding off the pole. Think of firefighters zooming down fire poles — with clothes on, a stainless steel or chrome pole is slippery. Because the inner thighs, hip fold, armpits, and midriff are all crucial contact points for many tricks, they all need to be exposed. 

Here’s what some pole athletes are afraid to admit: Pole outfits are frequently not only tiny, but sexy, and intentionally so. Many pole dancers, including online censorship researcher and blogger Carolina Are, don’t think that they should have to hide that to be respected as artists and athletes. Just because “something is sexual, doesn’t make it less beautiful, or less hard to do as an extreme sport,” she said.

Some of the first pole studio owners, like Fawnia Mondey and Alena Downs, were strippers first, bringing what they learned at clubs to women outside the industry. In 2005, the first World Pole Championship primarily featured strippers as competitors. But, Are said, the more normie hobbyists entered the pole world, the more pole entrepreneurs distanced themselves from sex workers. The social media hashtag #NotAStripper was big in 2016, widely used by young, white women new to pole who were desperate to offload the cultural baggage of their new hobby.

In an attempt to earn respect and an aura of legitimacy in the international sports world, the IPSF and other pole federations rebranded “pole dancing” as “pole sport” or “pole fitness.” Rather than (accurately) trace pole’s origins to Hoochie Coochie and burlesque dancers, a certain brand of athlete would rewrite history, attributing modern pole fitness to the ancient male-dominated sports of Mallakhamb — performing yoga poses and wrestling grips on a wooden pole — and Chinese acrobatic pole. 

Bond understands why some pole athletes try to separate themselves from strippers, despite the harm it causes professional erotic dancers. As a studio owner, she’s had ads rejected by social media platforms “if there’s any amount of butt shown, and sometimes even when there’s not.” Across the board, pole accounts are reportedly shadowbanned on TikTok and Instagram, preventing dancers from marketing themselves and monetizing their work. “If these examples are a snapshot of our society,” Are said, “I doubt the Olympics would be any more progressive.” 

Today, pole incorporates many flavors of movement, from sensual body rolls to dynamic aerial tumbles. But what’s truly transformative about pole as a movement practice isn’t its athleticism — it’s “the pushing of boundaries of what constitutes strength and power,” and “the liberation from shame,” Are said. Establishing technical scores for something so subjective is tricky, and dancers disagree on whether it should be done at all. “Anytime you watch a movement practice that is embodying art,” Bond said, “it’s really hard to create standards.” 

Many of the movements codified by IPSF require both extreme flexibility and strength. Pole athletes competing under its guidelines have to include a set number of tricks from a long list of “flexibility elements” and “strength elements,” with more points awarded to those performing longer continuous sequences of harder, more well-executed tricks. Like gymnastics, pole sport is largely judged based on execution (how flawlessly a trick was performed) and difficulty. But because pole is more “dance” than gymnastics, originality, charisma, and confidence also contribute to the final score. 

While gymnasts usually begin training as children, when they’re more pliable and less afraid of hurting themselves, US pole dancers usually aren’t introduced to the sport until adulthood. Studios that do welcome kids face immediate backlash from conservative media in the US, so many instructors avoid teaching children altogether. 

But in Europe and Latin American countries, pole studios often cater to children, where it’s viewed no differently than youth gymnastics or martial arts. Russia has a well-established youth pole federation, creating a pipeline for future Olympic hopefuls to train and compete. Youth pole dancing competitions look a lot like competitions in rhythmic gymnastics or acrobatics — incredibly impressive, albeit standardized and sanitized.

But with standardization comes repetition. Just like the wolf turn has become ubiquitous in gymnastics balance beam and floor routines because it’s a big point-earner, pole tricks like Russian splits pop up over and over again in high-level routines.

Some dancers worry that this could tarnish the essence of the movement, a concern shared by many B-boys and B-girls leading up to breaking’s Olympic debut. A pole fitness event organized by a federation like IPSF, the current model for Olympic pole sport, involves watching a bunch of performances where people are pushing their bodies to the limit to maximize points. While it showcases athleticism in a way that the IOC may be able to stomach, Are said that “trying to clean up something that is naturally gloriously filthy, nuanced, and porous” strips dancers of their ability to experiment, tell stories, and own their sexuality.

Bond is hopeful that even a sanitized version of pole will give artists the platform they need to introduce a large audience to the full spectrum of movement embodied at clubs and studios. Given society’s squeamishness around sensuality, “we have to play by those rules in order to move our industry of pole forward,” she said. “We only push these things forward by giving people a glimpse.”

Others are less optimistic. If the IOC can embrace all of pole’s history, including its sexuality, and make space for sensual expression in its scoring system — which seems exceedingly unlikely — that would be great. 

“If not,” Are said, “bye.”