The Competitive, Athletic, Hugely Popular Sport That the Olympics Won’t Touch With a 10-Foot Pole (2024)

This is part of Slate’s 2024 Olympics coverage. Read more here.

The fight for pole dancing to be included in the Olympics began, unlike most sports, in Ibiza’s party scene. More specifically, it was born inside the legendary Manumission Motel, a pink, triangular former brothel that, in the late 1990s, became a 24/7 after-party. For the three summers it was open, starting in 1998, only a select few were permitted access to this hedonistic heaven, and Katie Coates—then a bartender at the motel and now the co-founder of the International Pole Sports Federation—was one of them.

Hidden within the motel’s exclusive walls was the Pink puss* Strip Joint, which featured a small stage and two floor-to-ceiling poles, and was decorated to look like a “beautiful, curved, and very pink vulva.” Each night after the strip show had finished, Coates would take her out-of-hours turn on the pole, practicing after her shifts until she’d begun to master the art of what she’d later coin “pole sports,” a fully clothed, competitive, and highly athletic form of dance. “I taught myself by watching other people and throwing myself around a bit,” Coates told me via Zoom from her home in Hertfordshire, England. “I wouldn’t say that was the best way to learn, but that’s how I learned.”

Over the next few years, Coates devoted her life to this newfound skill, working as a pole dancer at London’s now-defunct adult lifestyle show Erotica, rigorously testing the world’s first portable pole (created by X-Pole in 2001) before it went into production, and setting up her own pole fitness school, the now-shuttered Vertical Dance, in 2004. But it was in 2006 that her Olympic dreams started to take shape.

“Pole became a fitness form for everyone to take part in,” Coates recalled. “It was a different way of getting fit, and it was great because it was super challenging but also a really fantastic social thing.” As the classes grew and spread across the country, small competitions started to spring up. “They were in backyards, nightclubs, or bars, with judges who were friends of friends or Z-list celebrities,” she explained. “People started working hard and putting effort into the shows, buying costumes, working out, and curating different influences for their choreography, from dance to circus. But they’d be judged on the loudest clap, so if you brought an entourage of 50 people, you’d tend to win. And I started thinking that was quite unfair—people were making a lot of effort and not really getting rewarded.”

This effort included a lot of working out in order to maintain the extreme athleticism needed to pole dance—at least at a competitive level. As she had a pole at home (owing to her aforementioned side hustle as a portable pole tester), Coates could build this athleticism simply via, as she puts it, “practice, practice, practice.” Other pole dancers had to put in regular shifts at the gym to maintain the enviable level of fitness required. “I lift weights and train contortion a few times a week as cross-training for pole dance, as well as several hours of on-the-pole training and several hours of teaching each week,” Alyssa Taubin, a pole dance instructor and the owner of Seattle’s Positive Spin Pole Dance Fitness, said of her routine.

But, she added: “You don’t need to be athletic just to start, and all styles of pole will build strength. I was never athletic before starting pole, but after a decade of working on it, I’m stronger than I ever thought possible.”

Seeing this kind of hard work—and the strength that came with it—Coates began to think (rather naïvely, as she admits now), “Why aren’t we in the Olympic Games?” Unsure where to start, Coates conducted a survey in 2006, asking the pole dancing community what they thought about the sport’s potential inclusion in the international competition. Ten thousand people voted in favor of the idea. Soon, an American colleague contacted her with the idea to set up an international federation. That person was Tim Trautman—a businessman who already co-owned a pole studio in the U.S. In 2009, he and Coates co-founded the International Pole Sports Federation, or IPSF.

Since then, the federation has been hugely successful. They’ve helped create 25 national federations that they govern, put on an annual international competition (called the World Pole & Aerial Championships), and even helped pole sports achieve Olympic “observer status” in 2017 (a now-defunct title that meant pole was provisionally regarded as a sport). The IPSF has also drawn up meticulous rules and regulations from scratch—which, since 2011, have grown from 20 moves and 25 pages to hundreds of moves and 450 pages—as well as scoring and judging criteria which take into account complexity of movements, choreography, style, and expressiveness. The sport, which requires a level of strength, coordination, and artistry that would leave most athletes breathless, has also historically been dominated by women. By mid-2011, an estimated 95 percent of pole sports athletes were women and girls, though men’s participation increased by more than 70 percent when male categories were opened in 2017. According to the IPSF, there are now more than 3,000 athletes—aged 10 to 75—competing worldwide, each of whom are judged in line with Olympic standards. (According to Coates, this means that athletes are judged with fairness, transparency, and via a set scoring system enforced by highly trained judges.)

And yet, the battle for Olympic recognition hasn’t been smooth sailing. In fact, it’s mostly been, according to Coates, “a long-winded, misogynistic, horrific road to hell,” and one that you’re unlikely to win “unless you’re a man over 50 who’s [willing to] kiss the butts of the right people.”

For context, the journey for any sport to participate in the Olympics isn’t easy—but it is possible. Since the modern Olympic Games began in 1896, approximately 30 new sports have become lasting additions, with 16 of those being introduced in the past 40 years. Most recently, skateboarding, climbing, and surfing were added to the Olympic roster at the Tokyo Summer Games in 2020, while breakdancing will make its debut this summer in Paris, followed by ski mountaineering at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy.

The process of gaining recognition is lengthy and confusing, with many hoops to jump through, each with an unfathomable number of acronyms. Before being able to apply for recognition by the IOC (International Olympic Committee), a sporting federation has to first obtain the status of IF (International Sports Federation). To do this, it must be the only federation governing the sport worldwide, have existed for at least five years, and be a member of SportAccord—now the umbrella organization for all international sports federations—or have a minimum of 50 affiliated countries from at least three continents. The federation must also comply with the OC (Olympic Charter)—the rules, essentially—and the WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) code.

But recognition doesn’t equal Olympic sport status. Whether a sport moves from recognition to actually competing at the games is up to the IOC, and it’s evaluated based on factors like number of athletes, value added, youth interest, and popularity (i.e., ticket sales and media interest).

Even more confusingly, this is all in the process of changing. Last year, GAISF, or the Global Association of International Sports Federations—the umbrella organization for all international sports federations, organizers of multi-sports games, and sport-related international associations—was dissolved, and its responsibilities were transferred to a restructured SportAccord. While this may sound like a fairly innocuous change, it means that all sports that held “observer status”—like pole—have been stripped of this title and must now apply for AIMS (Alliance of Independent Recognised Members of Sports) membership if they’re still interested in becoming an Olympic sport. (Observer status was the first step toward full GAISF membership, and gave sports access to the GAISF network for support and guidance—for a fee—and lasted two years, but could be renewed.)

Despite chasing AIMS for months, I was unable to get a comment from the organization, but a May press release hinted at the new path to recognition, which AIMS president Stephan Fox described as an “elevator process” where IFs progress from AIMS membership to IOC recognition to ARISF (Association of IOC Recognised International Sports Federations) and then, finally, to inclusion in the Olympic Games. A representative for SportAccord told me that the AIMS application is currently being revamped, and, on June 14, said that details were expected to be published online within the next few weeks—at the time of publication, there’s been no news since the May press release.

If all of this sounds convoluted, that’s because it is. And it effectively undid years of the IPSF’s hard work. Now Coates feels like she’s back at the starting line. “We’ve done all of this work trying to meet their criteria and yet no one has set anything in place to look after the observer members,” she said, frustrated. “It’s scandalous. I spent the entire last year trying to contact AIMS and they didn’t even return my calls or emails. We’ve been left hanging.”

Disappointingly, Coates said the IPSF hasn’t even really seen much benefit from holding observer status. “In order to become a full member, we need 50 national federations recognized,” she said. “In five years, we probably got five recognized. It’s just an impossible task. We never really got anywhere and we never got any support. I think they were just trying to placate us and shut us up. It broke my soul because it felt like I’d reached the summit only to find another, much tougher mountain in front of me.”

Other former observer federations have said the same. “To put it mildly, it’s a mess,” Patrick Nally, president of the International Federation of Match Poker—who helped GAISF set up its first permanent headquarters in 1978—told me over the phone. Like pole sports, match poker was granted observer status in 2017, before having it stripped last year. “There’s no reality that being an observer member is going to achieve you anything other than whatever fees they charge you. The dream of thinking that there’s some lovely ladder that we can climb up and eventually we’ll appear in the Olympic stadium is fiction. You might be on a ‘ladder,’ but there’s absolutely no likelihood of going up unless the IOC says that they want you.”

And yet, it’s clearly not impossible to get IOC recognition and compete at the Olympic Games. So why do some sports have to navigate nightmarish hoop-jumping while others seem to get a relatively easy ride? As Nally suggested, the answer might be as simple as: If the IOC wants you, you’re in. If not, you’re not.

But for pole sports, it’s not just about bureaucracy. No matter how desexualized pole fitness may be (which is itself a controversial topic within the broader pole dancing community), there’s still an enormous amount of stigma tied to pole, owing to its history in the sex industry. While strippers undoubtedly feel the force of this more than their pole fitness counterparts, both sex workers and non-sex-workers involved in pole dancing face online censorship and discrimination. (It’s worth repeating that pole dancers stay clothed and necessarily use a pole, while strippers often take their clothes off—or get very close to it—and perform other choreographed routines and lap dances that may not always incorporate a pole.) At Polepeople, for example, a London-based pole studio (the U.K.’s first) that opened in 2003, instructors frequently get shadowbanned or censored online. “The stigma from the sex industry infiltrates everything we do,” founder Alison Hudd told me. “People have had videos removed even though there’s no nudity and they’re doing amazing tricks.”

This has hindered Coates’ work since the very beginning. “I remember trying to find a gym and so many shut the door in my face,” she said. “When we did our first competition in 2012, we booked Crystal Palace Sports Centre [in southeast London] for it, but they canceled at the last minute because they said we were disgusting.”

Things have gotten better for pole sports in recent years, though, with Coates pointing to the influx of children taking up the sport as “reflective of how much the image has changed.” “Our community has got a lot to be proud of,” she said. “What other sports can say they’ve started from scratch—no rules, regulations, committee, nor federation—and with a massive stigma attached to them? There’s not a single sport looking to get recognized that’s done anything like we have. We look at some of the new sports, and we’re like, ‘You’ve had such an easy ride.’ ”

Nonetheless, Coates claims pole’s association with the sex industry is still hugely impacting her Olympic goal. When pole sports was given observer status, Coates said she was hopeful that the “credibility” of that title would help with sponsorship. But, she explained, it didn’t. Coates also recalls an incident at a SportAccord convention during which some of the other sport federation presidents (she declined to confirm which) referred to representatives from the IPSF as “the stripper girls.” Although Coates didn’t give specific examples of how the IOC itself discriminated against pole dancing, it’s hard to ignore the fact that pole is the most sexualized sport, often facing widespread criticism—including accusations that pole dancing is inherently sexist—whenever it appears in the media, particularly when practiced by children. (Gymnasts have similarly faced sexualization, but as the long-standing Olympic sport dates back to the 1800s, is far more institutionalized than pole, and doesn’t have to contend with comparisons to stripping, it isn’t seen as taboo.)

There are conflicting views about the origins of pole dancing. Some trace it back to the ancient Indian sport of mallakhamb, meaning “wrestling pole,” and 12^th-century “Chinese Pole,” known in China as “acrobatic pole,” both of which historically involve men performing gymnastic moves or tricks on vertical poles. Others argue that it’s more accurate to trace the modern pole dancing associated with strip clubs back to the traveling “Little Egypt” circuses of late-19^th-century America. These shows featured “Kouta Kouta” or “Hoochie Coochie” belly dances performed by Egyptian Ghawazi dancers (women performing for money), who, in the 1920s, introduced pole into their routines. This is also when the term “exotic dancer” increased in use, a label that’s often deemed to have racist origins, as it was used as a way of othering dancers of color from non-Western cultures.

There’s no doubt, though, that pole as we know it was born out of the sex industry. By the mid-2000s, pole dancing had started to attract interest outside of its underground, strip club roots, emerging as an increasingly popular fitness activity. This was helped, in no small part, by pole’s increasingly frequent cameos in mainstream music videos—whether in Dr. Dre’s “The Next Episode” (2000), Kate Moss (another Manumission Motel guest) pole dancing in the White Stripes’ “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself” (2003), or, later, Kylie Minogue featuring a pole in her 2008 video “Wow.” But, while this may have heightened mainstream demand, pole studios and competitions were already beginning to thrive, and strippers and former strippers were at the helm. In Canada in the 1980s and 1990s, strippers had begun teaching pole dancing inside the clubs, including Fawnia Mondey-Dietrich, who’s credited with creating some of the world’s first pole dancing instruction videos. In the early 2000s, when the first pole studios were opening up globally, it tended to be strippers doing the teaching.

This history is essential to pole sports, and yet many detractors believe that in order for the IPSF to succeed in gaining Olympic recognition, this history could be forcibly erased. This has led to a chasm opening up in the pole dancing community. “Some people think I’m brilliant and some think I’m the devil,” admitted Coates. “When [we developed] pole sports, it completely divided everything. It wasn’t that we were disassociating ourselves [from stripping], it’s just that we don’t do what sexy pole does. We’re not the same thing, so we went in a completely different direction, but that upset a lot of people because they said we were trying to put one kind of pole down to elevate ourselves.”

This is, indeed, the perception among many of the IPSF’s detractors, especially sex workers and their allies. “The need to sanitize pole dancing’s image in an attempt to elevate its legitimacy and societal standing only harms sex workers in the process,” said Gemma Rose, a U.K.–based pole dance instructor, sex worker, and Sex Workers Union representative. “Sporty polers are never going to get away from the inherent association with the sex industry. Instead of othering the craft, slapping a ‘sport’ label on it, and separating themselves from its roots, they could recognize the origins and fight for stigmatization of both pole dancing and sex workers. We could unite instead of divide.”

“Don’t like the association?” she added. “Choose a different hobby.”

Taubin, the Seattle-based pole dance instructor, has experienced this stigma firsthand, which has made it hard for her to get a lease to start her studio and run ads. But, she asserts, while it can feel like “the path of least resistance to try to desexualize the sport, that’s contrary to the more important fight of liberating sex workers, as well as healthy, consensual displays of sexuality.” “It’s true that pole doesn’t have to be sexual for everyone,” she continued, “but it’s deeply unfair to the sex workers who helped shape pole dancing to erase them and their contributions.”

Both Rose and Mia, a 25-year-old amateur pole dancer from Texas, also criticize a hashtag used among pole sporters: #NotAStripper. “It’s messed up for sex workers who started it all to continuously receive hate,” said Mia. “That hashtag tries to separate ‘us’ from ‘them,’ even though we owe our scene to sex workers. We’re essentially just cosplayers here.”

So, while this new Olympic setback has been a devastating blow for the IPSF, it might come as a relief for others—and not just because of the potential erasure of pole dancing’s roots. When skateboarding—which was also once a countercultural activity—was recognized as an Olympic sport, many saw its “sportification,” including putting value on “tricks,” as not in the spirit of skateboarding itself. Even Olympic skateboarders themselves have expressed their discomfort with this, with Alexis Sablone, a member of the U.S. women’s street team, previously telling NBC News: “The best part of skateboarding is about style and [not playing] by the rules. It’s like, ‘I’m going to make this up and do it my own way.’ ” The same thing happened when breakdancing became an Olympic sport—and similar criticisms have been leveled at pole sports.

“I used to be totally on board with pole becoming an official sport at the Olympics, and for all the obvious reasons, including more public spotlight, an improved reputation, and more respect for the sport,” said 27-year-old CL, an amateur pole dancer from California. “But now I think it would sanitize it and uproot it from its not-so-child-friendly history and subculture. Not just that, but anything that makes it onto the Olympic stage winds up having to obey a bunch of dumb rules and standards that make it completely bland and soulless to watch. I’d hate to see pole become something unrecognizably cleansed of creativity and expression because of some newfangled organization imposing nonsense rules onto it.”

As well as potentially jeopardizing the creativity of pole as an art form, Olympic detractors say “elevating” it to this level could, as Rose put it, “contribute to other issues existing in the community, such as fatphobia, ableism, and movement supremacy.”

Taubin shares these concerns. “The Olympics set a precedent that, in order to be valuable within a sport, one must start young, have a certain body, and hit certain benchmarks of performance,” she said. “In the pole community, we benefit most by celebrating all styles and levels equally. The world doesn’t need another sport that ranks people based on one set of standards to celebrate those with specific abilities. We need more spaces that celebrate the journey of connectedness with each other and our bodies, whatever that looks like for each person.”

But does it have to be either/or? Can’t two types of pole dancing exist at once? Hudd, of Polepeople, believes so. “One of the amazing things about pole is that it can be so many different things,” she told me. “I don’t think that it’s necessarily a bad thing that it’s evolved into a sport or circus art. It’s just a different form. Everyone should acknowledge that pole dancing comes from strippers—and not be ashamed of that—but that doesn’t mean it can’t change and exist in a different realm. And actually these two things can lift each other up in a really positive way.”

Or, as CL puts it: “The two disciplines don’t have to be mutually exclusive or compete for existence. It’s possible to branch off from what strippers have done.”

Leila Davis, the founder of Blackstage, a London-based organization that centers and supports pole dancers of color, would like to see pole dancing be credited and funded in the same way that, for example, ballet is, but is skeptical of both the Olympic campaign and the IPSF itself. “Organizations like that are largely white and have very gendered criteria,” she explained. “I don’t want this to be taken forward by an organization that won’t really value people of color and those who are gender-nonconforming. I don’t want it to be ousting sex workers of color, who founded the pole that we do now.”

“But,” she continued, “I do want it to be recognized as an art and a sport. If pole was in the Olympics, more money would come into it and you could actually make a career out of it. The industry would be elevated. Maybe we’d have better facilities. In some ways, it might help to destigmatize [pole dancing more broadly]. I also understand that it must be desexualized to be an Olympic sport, and I think a lot of sex workers don’t mind that. It’s just that, when desexualizing it, we also need to recognize where it came from and be as inclusive as possible when taking it [to the Olympic level].”

Coates isn’t blind to these criticisms, and has been fielding them for the last decade. But, like others, she is “staunchly protective over [her] genre of pole.” And the years of fighting—both within the pole community and with Olympic protocol—have taken a toll. When we spoke in early March, Coates revealed that the IPSF was set to publicly announce her resignation later that day. Although it’s a decision she made herself, it’s clearly been a difficult one, and Coates was emotional. “It’s going in a direction I never wanted it to,” she said. “And it’s probably time for someone else to take over. It just wasn’t going anywhere, and I can’t see that it will go anywhere in the next 10 years.”

That’s not to say the Olympics fight is over. In fact, the IPSF is still pursuing recognition, even under new leadership. “For us, it’s quite obvious that a sport like ours, that requires so much focus, determination, athleticism, and talent, should be present within the Olympic movement,” said Bianca Scholten, the federation’s new acting president. “Our athletes are incredible and deserve to show what they can do on the biggest sporting stage in the world. So we have to persist and remain hopeful.”

Although the IPSF’s battle goes on without her, Coates hasn’t given up, either—even if she is worn out and frustrated by the whole thing. “I don’t believe there’s a single person who can speak on behalf of pole sports with such passion and knowledge as I can,” she said. “I truly believe that we will one day be in the Olympics, and I will continue to stand on my soapbox and tell anyone who’ll listen about the merits of our sport. If you spent one day in my shoes and saw the amazing athletes who’ve dedicated their lives to this—and I’m talking people having babies out of season so they can make sure they’re ready for the next World Championships—[you’d think they should] be recognized on par with every other athlete on the planet.”

Besides, concluded Coates, the Olympics are simply missing a trick by continuing to exclude pole sports: “I guarantee, love it or hate it, if you said, ‘At 12 p.m. on the first day of the Olympic Games, it’s the first-ever pole competition,’ the TV [ratings] would crash.”

Here’s to hoping that day comes.