[Leighton Keith | stuff]
“I wanted more and more. It’s like a high, mastering moves and achieving things you never thought you could achieve.”
Everybody knows athletics, swimming and pole vaulting are Olympic sports – now pole dancing could be joining them.
And one instructor from Taranaki says she welcomes the idea.
Last week the Global Association of International Sports Federations granted observer status to the International Pole Sports Federation, meaning the activity is now provisionally recognised as a sport and the push is on for it to be included in the 2024 Olympic Games.
The walls at April Krijger’s pole dancing studio, Pole FX in New Plymouth, display her qualifications to teach the sport which could soon be an Olympic discipline.
April Krijger, of New Plymouth, who has turned a curiosity about pole dancing into a business, the said the recognition could only help increase its popularity.
“I can’t imagine I would ever be pushing somebody into the Olympic arena but to see the sport recognized is fabulous.”
Krijger was quick to explain the sport, which combines dance and acrobatics centred on a vertical pole, didn’t have its origins in seedy strip clubs but had in fact been around for hundreds of years in Chinese and Indian cultures.
She first became curious about it eight years ago and attended classes at New Plymouth’s only strip club The Crave and was immediately hooked.
“I just thought it would be really fun to do – swinging around the pole and I instantly fell in love.