Tori Peña: The Irish dancer who became Ireland’s Olympic pole vaulter

The place names have always seemed so familiar.

Even from eight thousand kilometres away, Tori Peña knew of Burfoot and of Inch Island. She was regaled with talk of weekends in Buncrana.

Huntington Beach, California, on the west coast of the United States, might have been a world apart, but the young Peña was aware of her roots. Proud of them, too.

Angela Coyle, upped sticks from Derry to make an exciting new life in 1955, two years after marrying Bill McCoy, whom she met at a dance in her hometown.

The links to Ireland were strengthened in 2010 when Peña - the daughter of Anglea and Bill’s daughter Cathy - by then an aspiring world-level pole vaulter, was able to declare to represent Ireland.

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“She still has her accent,” Peña says of her grandmother, 90 now and based at Seal Beach, Bill having passed in 1997.

“We were raised with her stories. I have countless stories about her going to Inch Island, spending weekends in Buncrana. Those places were so real in my memory. It just felt very near and dear. We always feel a really strong connection.”

The family would follow Mass on Sundays and the sense of Irishness was such that the young Tori was an accomplished Irish dancer. In 2003, she completed at the World Championships in Killarney.

When next she would touch down on the Emerald Isle, in July 2010, she had worlds of a different sort in her sights.

At Morton Stadium, wearing the blue and white singlet of the Finn Valley Athletic Club, Peña won pole vault gold when going over the bar at 4.15m.

A new name was circling in Santry.

When she started at Edison High School, Peña was athletic, although pole vault seemed a rather random choice as a specialised event.

“I was interested in athletics because I knew that I was quick and I liked to race,” Peña tells Donegal Live while on a visit back to Finn Valley AC, with whom she won six national gold medals and represented Ireland at two Olympic Games, three World Championships and three European Championships.

Her Irish records - 4.46m indoors and 4.60m outdoors - still stand.

At Edison High School, she competed in long jump and sprints. There was Irish dancing and soccer, too, before the eureka moment.

Peña, who now works in the cardiac unit of the Saddleback Medical Center in Laguna Hills says: “When my brother went to High School, he got introduced to pole vault. He was a senior when I was a freshman and he said to me: ‘You gotta give this a go. You’ll love it’. I started and never looked back.

“It’s such an awkward event. You have to learn how to hold the pole, how to run up properly, how to run with the pole. You start with drills into the sand pit. Then, you’re just itching: ‘Let me go!’ It’s a couple of months in before you learn how to put a bend in the pole and get some energy into the pole. When you get that energy back, that’s when the light switches.”

The story of how Peña winded up seven time zones away to compete began with a simple email.

Greg Peña, her father, is of Mexican descent, but was born and raised in Montebello, eight miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Greg’s own parents were born in the United States which meant representing Mexico wasn’t a runner when they came enquiring of the rising pole vault star.

“That was when the lightbulb - ‘I have a granny from Ireland’ - came on,” she says. “Going to Europe was in the back of my head after a high school coach said that’s where I needed to go to compete.

“I sort of tucked it away as a crazy idea. When I finished college and was still having some success, I just thought about traveling for one summer, maybe just to meet the Irish team. I found the Athletics Ireland website and just emailed everybody.”

Patsy McGonagle, then the Irish athletics team manager, responded and the wheels were soon in motion.

Soon after being given the green light to represent Ireland, Peña competed at the 2010 European Championships in Barcelona. A few months later, she touched down in Paris for the European Indoors.

With the World Championships looming in 2011, Peña had yet to qualify. As was often the case in her world - remember, these were the days before smart phones became so smart - Peña would often dash from place to place at late notice.

Peña knew the Swiss pole vaulter Nicole Büchler, a three-time Olympian, who helped secure an entry for the Stabhochsprung-Meeting in Frauenkappelen. Effectively, Peña’s regime consisted of email meet directors in an attempt to find somewhere to jump. She needed a 4.40m clearance to make it to the World Championships in Daegu and left Germany, her poles tied to the roof with towels.

“There were always speeding tickets in Switzerland,” Peña laughs now. “In 2010 and 2011, I was still training at my college and didn’t have the right system in place. I was chasing 4.40m for the standard and got it just in the nick of time. It was a nice progression from Europeans in Barcelona to getting to the Worlds.”

In early 2012, at the Beach Track & Field Classic at Cerritos College, Peña hit the Olympic Games qualifying mark of 4.50m.

Peña was Ireland’s first ever Olympic pole vaulter and went down a hard road to get there.

Her arrival into Ireland saw her poles impounded ahead of her first competition in 2010.

For the 2012 Olympics in London, Peña had to use a different airline and airport to the rest of the Irish team with only Ryanair willing to transport her poles.

Before the European Team Championships in 2011, Peña was based in Germany, but getting her poles to Izmir was, again, an issue.

Having been refused at an airport in America, the poles arrived in Germany only to be held by the customs.

Peña had to make familiar approaches: “I had to go to every girl in the competition in Turkey and say: ‘Hey, I’m Tori, I’m from Ireland, I don’t have a pole’.

“I didn’t actually have my poles for the first two or three meets I did in Europe. It’s a friendly community. As pole vaulters, you realise the hassle. You’d just show up to a meeting, find someone who is about the same size and be friendly.”

A graduate of UCLA, where she trained under an Irish descendent, Anthony Curran, Peña made some tough calls, from basing in Germany while in Europe, to training in roaring heat in Phoenix, Arizona ‘to get technically and physically into the best shape possible’.

Tori Peña with Patsy and Rosaleen McGonagle.

“Getting to the Olympics wasn’t a dream until I was over here and people like Patsy were saying that I wasn’t far off,” she says. “Even when I came here at first, after Patsy had made this happen, I wasn’t thinking about major championships at all.

“It took some time to find the right training group and I went to Phoenix. I needed to get 4.50m for qualification and I got it at Cerritos College. It was like a full circle moment because I had competed there in high school and done well.”

Peña ‘no marked’ in London at the 2012 Olympic Games. It took some time for that feeling of regret to leave her mind.

“Oh gosh, it was a nightmare,” she says. “I definitely should have started sports psychology so much sooner. I did a little in college and I don’t know why I didn’t stick with it. Psychology just wasn’t the rage that it is now, I suppose.

“I didn’t think I was so under-prepared for London. I just thought it was no big deal and something I did all the time. I didn’t have a real plan, mentally, for when it wasn’t going well. Then, when it wasn’t going well, I just didn’t know what to to. It was a devastating experience to say the least and it was hard to bounce back from that.

“Everyone was so excited and it actually went shit. It went as bad as it could go. But, now I’m at a place where I can look and say it was incredible to be there. In the moment I didn’t think I could put myself through that for another four years.”

Back she came, though, and cleared 4.30m in Rio in 2016. Although not enough to make the final, it wasn’t a bad way to bow out of the sport.

“Rio was so different,” Peña says. “I still wasn’t super pleased, but I was able to enjoy it. I knew it was going to be my last season, so I was able to take it in better.”