No, a French Pole Vaulter Did Not Lose Out on an Olympic Medal Because of His Crotch

The internet blamed Anthony Ammirati's "bulge" for ending his Olympic dreams — but the vaulter knocked down the crossbar with another appendage

French pole vaulter Anthony Ammirati won't be moving on to the men's pole vault final at the Paris Olympics — but contrary to speculation, it has nothing to do with his crotch.

Ammirati, 21, went viral on Saturday, Aug. 3 after a video of one of his pole vault attempts made it look like he failed to clear the bar because of his "bulge," which seemed to knock down the crossbar. The theory quickly picked up steam and spread like wildfire on social media and through headlines, but a closer look at the video shows that was not actually the case.

During the jump, Ammirati tries to clear the bar but first hits it with his shins and then his knees. It's already a failed jump, but to add injury (presumably) to insult, Ammirati knocks the bar off fully after he hits it with his crotch.

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That jump, though, was not the reason Ammirati won't be competing in the pole vault final on Monday. In pole vault, each athlete gets attempts to make increasingly higher jumps, starting at 5.40 meters. Ammirati made the first two heights — at 5.40 and 5.60 — but in his three attempts at making the next height, 5.70 meters, he was unsuccessful. Nine other men hit the mark and qualified for the final.

So, truly: His bulge was not the cause of his botched Olympic run.

Instead, as expected, Sweden's Armand Duplantis will be the one to beat as he defends his gold from the 2020 Tokyo Games.

Crotch issues have afflicted Olympic pole vaulters before, though. At the 2016 Rio Olympics, Japan's Hiroki Ogita also went viral for bulge issues, when his leg, then crotch, then arms took down the crossbar during qualifications.

“I never expected the foreign media to take me down like this,” he wrote in a post on X (then Twitter) after the event, according to BBC. “It’s one thing if it was true, but I have to say I’m pretty devastated that they’d go so far to make something up to mock and ridicule me so much.”

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Ogita did add, though, that he found it comical in retrospect.

“Watching again, this is pretty funny, if I say so myself. LOL.”

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