Allison Stokke Biography

Allison Rebecca Stokke (born March 22, 1989) is an American track and field athlete and fashion model. She broke a number of American records for high school pole vaulting. At the age of seventeen, images of her were widely shared on the internet resulting in her becoming an internet phenomenon. Her unsought sex symbol status was covered nationally and internationally and informed debate on the sexualization of sportswomen and of young people via the internet.

Stokke continued to pole vault, attending University of California, Berkeley and competing for their California Golden Bears collegiate track team. After college she became a professional vaulter and sports model for Nike and Athleta, among others.

Biography

Early life

Born to Allan and Cindy Stokke in Newport Beach, California, she grew up in a sporting family - her older brother David was a national level youth gymnast. After trying gymnastics, she took up pole vaulting while attending Newport Harbor High School and soon became one of the country's best young vaulters. She won the age 15/16 United States title in 2004 with a championship record of .

She broke the American record for a high school freshman with a vault of in 2004 and then set a new high school sophomore record with in 2005. Her vaults were also the best ever achieved by an American aged fifteen and sixteen. Despite breaking her leg while at high school, she managed to win twice at the CIF California State Meet. In her senior year of high school she ranked second in the national high school rankings with a new best of . She finished eighth at the national junior championships that year.

Internet fame

Images of Stokke competing in New York in early 2007 were taken by a journalist for a Californian track and field website and placed online. In May, the image was then re-posted by With Leather, a sports blog with a large male fanbase, remarking on the attractiveness of seventeen-year-old Stokke under the heading "Pole Vaulting is Sexy, Barely Legal". The photographer threatened to sue site owner Matt Ufford if he did not remove the image, but the article had already received significant attention and been posted at dozens of other websites. A tribute website to Stokke soon emerged with several images of her competing in the pole vault and, after these images spread via social media, internet fan groups attracted thousands of followers. Within several weeks, her photos had become such an internet phenomenon that they generated comment pieces nationally from The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, and internationally from British broadcaster the BBC, Australian daily The Sydney Morning Herald, and the German weekly Der Spiegel, in addition to over a million results on search engines. CBS also gave television coverage, using her story to highlight the dangers of the internet being used to publicly sexualize young people.

Stokke initially tried to control the situation herself but after being bombarded with emails and requests for photo shoots she sought a media consultant to handle her new found fame. She gave an interview on pole vaulting technique which was uploaded to YouTube and it received over one hundred thousand views, but comments and discussion on the internet largely remained sexual and in relation to her looks. Her father, a lawyer by trade, began to review online material to identify illegal behaviour or stalkers. Reflecting on her situation, Stokke told The Washington Post "even if none of it is illegal, it just all feels really demeaning. I worked so hard for pole vaulting and all this other stuff, and it's almost like that doesn't matter. Nobody sees that. Nobody really sees me." Der Spiegel noted that Stokke had become a "sex symbol against her will". The attention affected her psychologically: she said that she found the leering "creepy and a little scary" and now took care to lock doors behind her.

It was noted by the Los Angeles Times, among others, that Stokke did not seek or endorse such attention. In their book Technology, Power and Culture in the Network Society Brett Hutchins and David Rowe linked Stokke's case with that of American soccer players Alex Morgan and Hope Solo, where attractive white female athletes were fetishized and saw their public image framed sexually, undermining their sporting achievements. Using material in relation to Stokke, they also highlighted that social media comments were frequently insulting in nature and blamed the sexualization process on the women themselves. Others drew parallels with Brandi Chastain's celebration of winning the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup Final in her sports bra, where women's sporting moments were overshadowed by discussions of their appearance.

Later career

Many more photographers began to attend the track and field competitions she took part in and her internet fame persisted over the following years. However, she continued to study and earned an athletic scholarship to study sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. In her first year of competition for the California Golden Bears collegiate track team she broke the school record for a freshman athlete both indoors and outdoors with a vault of . She competed at the Pac-10 Conference and Mountain Pacific Sports Federation (MPSF) regional meets that season.

Stokke reached new heights in her second year at college, scaling in Sacramento, California. She finished eighth at the Pac-10 Championships, seventh at the MPSF Indoor Championships and made her debut at the NCAA Women's Division I Outdoor Track and Field Championships, ranking 19th with her best effort of . She focused on her studies in her third year at Berkeley and received conference all-academic honours at Pac-10 and MPSF level, as well as getting an honorable academic mention by the U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches Association. In her last year of collegiate vaulting she did not improve her best, coming eighth at the Pac-10 Championships and missing qualification for the NCAA Championships by two places at the regionals.

After finishing her degree, she continued to pole vault, although she did not rank highly among American athletes. A new lifetime best of came in the 2012 season as she aimed for the 2012 London Olympics. However, she did not perform well at the 2012 United States Olympic Trials, failing to clear the opening height of . Her 2015 best of (achieved in a third-place finish at the National Pole Vault Summit) ranked her outside of the top 30 American women that year.

She became a sportswear model, appearing in campaigns for Nike, Inc. and Athleta in 2015. She also began to work with GoPro, delivering a series of videos of her vaulting heights with the camera attached to her pole to demonstrate the inner working of the sport and advertise the action camera equipment. By 2016, her GoPro videos have received in excess of six million views on YouTube.

Images of Stokke competing were used by Bryan Konietzko and animators at Studio Mir as a body study for the character Korra for the animated series The Legend of Korra.