Pole Dance as a Sport

Axiom1418
Jun 25, 2021
3 min read

Updated: Jun 30, 2021

Nerves are running high! It’s competition day - rigging is being checked, coaches are giving last words of advice, and performers are hoping their palms will stop sweating by stage time.

“No one can find me right before I compete - I hide,” says Suzy Giannakopoulos, a competitive pole dancer with multiple wins.

“Where do you hide?” I slyly ask.

“Anywhere: in a bathroom stall, behind a pillar,” she jokes back. As a popular person in the pole community, Suzy needs this alone time to mentally prepare.

Months of training for the competition, hours and hours a week, comes down to about three minutes on the stage. There are numerous types of competitions worldwide ranging from those that call themselves “filthy” to those that associate with the “sporty” side of pole and have the seriousness of the Olympics. Most competitions have categories; for example, the Canadian Pole Fitness Association (CPFA) pole dance categories range from “After Hours” to “Pro".

Some competitions will even have levels within the categories, such as different age levels. One interesting category that puts a grin on my face is the Pole Sport Organization’s “Shadow Banned” category, which is for routines that would get shadow banned on Instagram.

Some competitions are more technical than others, and elements such as posture and alignment, creativity, and difficulty are judged. Riley Sanoe has judged for the CPFA and says that the more sport-like categories are similar to gymnastic competitions. Riley explains that these categories are more cut-and-dry when it comes to judging and are easier than judging categories such as “Pole Art” or “Director’s Cut,” the more artsy categories. Here, the elements being judged can be more subjective, such as “was there appropriate emotion?” and “were they able to tell a story?”

Putting on a competition takes months of prep. As soon as you finish the annual competition, you start planning the next. My 20-year career has been in recreation and leisure. I easily related to everything Elisabeth Magalhaes, the Director of the CPFA, said about running competitions, from recruiting and managing volunteers and staff to the nitty-gritty details.

Elisabeth says, “the goal is for the competition to run smoothly.” The competitors have a lot of emotions and thoughts going through their heads, and they don’t need to be panicked because the competition itself is disorganized. It’s a day full of stress for Elisabeth, but she has the strength to absorb it and deal with it. People seem to think that competitions just happen; they don’t understand all the work behind the scenes.

I asked Elisabeth if she experiences stigma around pole dance competitions. She said not as much anymore as pole has been mainstream for a while, and it helps that the CPFA is part of the Toronto Pro Show. However, she mentioned that when people see a pole involved in dance, they automatically sexualize it. She told me a story of how she submitted a video of her pole routine to organizers of a dance show and the organizers asked her to dress less sexually. Her costume consisted of a sports bra and shorts that offered complete coverage. However, performers in Brazilian dance were allowed to wear even less clothing. She also noted “I could do the exact same routine with bare feet and I could do the same routine with heels and one would be considered erotic and one would be considered contemporary, but they are the same routine.”

Recently pole dance has become a division in the Arnold Sports Festival, where it’s called Pole Fitness, and people are hoping it will be in the Olympics soon. I asked Elisabeth what she thought about the current movement to have pole dance in the Olympics. She said that it’s important to look at the “why.” Is it to legitimize pole dance, because “we don’t have to be legitimized. We are already legitimate… certain people will never see pole as legitimate and we don’t have to prove it to them.”