Human nature is straightforward. Since the beginning of organized sports, we've been drawn to watching strong individuals compete and perform acrobatic feats. Today, high-drama sports like women’s gymnastics, which are popular on TikTok, regularly dominate Olympic viewership on both television and streaming platforms. However, artistic gymnastics isn't the only way to witness extraordinary athleticism, with flips and splits on display.
Pole dancing, an art form that evolved from erotic striptease into a sport, resembles a more sensual version of gymnastics on a vertical bar. The athleticism involved in pole dancing, whether in a family-friendly competition or at a strip club, is undeniable. Even basic pole moves are no easy task—getting off the ground is like performing a pull-up, push-up, crunch, and air squat simultaneously. At the highest levels, pole athletes — yes, pole athletes — can execute several minutes of choreographed handstands, flips, tumbles, and other aerial stunts, often set to music. Sometimes, they even do it in eight-inch heels. Just like gymnastics, pole dancing becomes increasingly challenging over time, with dancers growing stronger, more flexible, and more inventive each year.
In the early 20th century, burlesque and striptease performers started incorporating poles into their acts, primarily out of necessity — bars had tiny stages, 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 for strippers to use in their performances. As pole dancing became more common in strip clubs, dancers began inventing more intricate tricks — climbing the pole to perform splits on the ceiling, twerking upside down, and plummeting back to the ground.
Although dancers usually practice and teach each other at clubs, the first pole studios opened in North America, Europe, and Australia in the early 2000s, transitioning the art of sensual movement on a vertical bar from strippers to hobbyists. Since then, pole dancing has exploded in popularity, with pole studios rapidly spreading worldwide. Today, there are over 600 studios in the US alone, with thousands more across every continent except Antarctica. Like many others, I was drawn into this world not through sex work, but through Groupon deals offering an intriguing alternative to Pilates. I stuck with it long enough to become a professional pole instructor, teaching everyone from microbiologists to goth teens to white-collar dads.
Clearly, pole dancing has broad appeal. It is also practiced globally, visually captivating, and physically demanding — meeting several criteria for Olympic recognition. The International Pole Sports Federation (IPSF), co-founded by Katie Coates, has been advocating for pole dancing as an Olympic sport for 15 years. They created a 126-page rulebook and gathered 10,000 signatures on a 2010 petition to make pole dancing an Olympic sport. The sport even earned provisional recognition from the now-defunct Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) in 2017, which was seen as a significant step toward gaining the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) formal recognition — a prerequisite for becoming an Olympic sport.
Yet, despite new sports like breaking being featured in Paris, pole dancing still hasn't made the cut, neither for this year nor for any future Games. Even equestrian vaulting has secured a comeback in 2032. So, what's holding pole dancing back?
The Challenge of Olympic Recognition
First, the straightforward answer: Achieving Olympic recognition requires a lot of hard, unpaid work, and few people are willing to take it on. Athletes in disciplines like pole dancing already struggle to make a living from their sport. (I survived on my pole instructor income for a couple of months, and I wouldn’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. (Full disclosure: I teach at Pole + Dance Studios.) “You don’t want to spend your time dealing with the administration, bureaucracy, and red tape that comes with getting your sport into the Olympics.”
Pole dancing’s Olympic push has largely been a one-woman show, with Coates juggling the roles of entrepreneur, diplomat, organizer, and athlete at the IPSF. “She’s one person trying to wear 15 hats,” Bond said. Even with a well-organized team, the task of getting a sport into the Olympics is daunting. For instance, 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 even be included again in 2028.
Pole dancing received GAISF “observer status” in 2017, giving the IPSF access to a network of international sports federations for support. This status was supposed to bring pole dancing closer to being taken seriously by the IOC, but the GAISF dissolved in 2022, forcing pole dancing back to square one.
“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.”
When comparing pole dancing to other Olympic sports, the exclusion can seem absurd. Pole dancing combines the awe-inspiring feats of gymnastics, the social media appeal of skateboarding, and the countercultural allure 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 dancing also brings something that the IOC might not be ready to handle: sexuality, along with a lot of cultural baggage.
The Transformation of Pole Dancing Into a Sport
Many Olympic sports feature athletes wearing minimal clothing. Female beach volleyball players often compete in bikinis, figure skaters perform in form-fitting, sheer-accented leotards, and French diver Jules Bouyer wore less than most pole dancers when his Speedo bulge went viral this year.
While revealing outfits are partly a nod to pole dancing’s roots, the skin-to-metal friction is also essential to prevent athletes from slipping off the pole. Just like firefighters sliding down poles — where clothes would make the pole too slippery — in pole dancing, the inner thighs, hip folds, armpits, and midriff must all be exposed for grip during many tricks.
Here’s what some pole athletes are reluctant to admit: Pole outfits are often not just minimal but intentionally sexy. Many pole dancers, including online censorship researcher and blogger Carolina Are, argue that they shouldn’t have to downplay this aspect to be respected as artists and athletes. Just because “something is sexual doesn’t make it less beautiful, or less difficult to perform as an extreme sport,” she said.
Some of the earliest pole studio owners, like Fawnia Mondey and Alena Downs, were strippers who brought their expertise from clubs to women outside the industry. In 2005, the first World Pole Championship featured mostly strippers as competitors. But, as Are pointed out, as more mainstream hobbyists entered the pole world, pole entrepreneurs began distancing themselves from sex workers. The social media hashtag #NotAStripper gained popularity in 2016, widely used by young, white women new to pole dancing who were eager to shed the cultural baggage of their new hobby.
In an effort to gain respect and 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 dancing’s origins to Hoochie Coochie and burlesque performers, some athletes prefer to attribute modern pole fitness to ancient male-dominated sports like Mallakhamb — which involves performing yoga poses and wrestling grips on a wooden pole — and Chinese acrobatic pole.
Bond understands why some pole athletes try to distance 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, making it difficult for dancers to market themselves and monetize their work. “If these examples are a snapshot of our society,” Are said, “I doubt the Olympics would be any more progressive.”
Today, pole dancing encompasses many styles of movement, from sensual body rolls to dynamic aerial stunts. But what’s truly revolutionary 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 challenging, 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 the IPSF require both extreme flexibility and strength. Pole athletes competing under its guidelines must include a set number of tricks from a long list of “flexibility elements” and “strength elements,” with more points awarded for performing longer continuous sequences of more difficult, well-executed tricks. Like gymnastics, pole sport is largely judged on execution (how flawlessly a trick is performed) and difficulty. But because pole dancing is more “dance” than gymnastics, originality, charisma, and confidence also contribute to the final score.
While gymnasts typically begin training as children when they’re more pliable and less afraid of injury, US pole dancers usually don’t start the sport until adulthood. Studios that do welcome children face immediate backlash from conservative media in the US, so many instructors avoid teaching kids altogether.
In contrast, in Europe and Latin America,
pole studios often cater to children, where it’s seen 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 resemble rhythmic gymnastics or acrobatics competitions — incredibly impressive, yet standardized and sanitized.
But with standardization comes repetition. Just as the wolf turn has become ubiquitous in gymnastics balance beam and floor routines because it earns high points, pole tricks like Russian splits appear repeatedly in high-level routines.
Some dancers worry that this could dilute the essence of the movement, a concern shared by many B-boys and B-girls before breaking’s Olympic debut. A pole fitness event organized by a federation like the IPSF, which is the current model for Olympic pole sport, involves watching a series of performances where athletes push their bodies to the limit to maximize points. While it showcases athleticism in a way that the IOC might find acceptable, Are said that “trying to sanitize something that is naturally gloriously complex, nuanced, and unapologetically sensual” strips dancers of their ability to experiment, tell stories, and embrace their sexuality.
Bond remains hopeful that even a sanitized version of pole dancing will give artists the platform they need to introduce a wide audience to the full spectrum of movement practiced in clubs and studios. Given society’s discomfort with sensuality, “we have to play by those rules in order to advance our industry,” she said. “We can only push things forward by giving people a glimpse.”
Others are less optimistic. If the IOC can embrace all aspects of pole dancing, including its sexuality, and allow space for sensual expression within its scoring system — which seems highly unlikely — that would be ideal.
“If not,” Are said, “then it’s not worth it.”