The Greatest Pogo Stick the World Has Ever Seen
A classic toy has been reengineered for extreme athletes. Can it appeal to normies too?
In the sweltering heat of downtown Pittsburgh, on the last Friday of June 2022, a 25-year-old from Tennessee named Dalton Smith stood in the middle of a throng of about 100 people in Market Square, clicked the strap of his helmet into place, and climbed atop his pogo stick. He tightly gripped two handlebars, his sneakers resting on two pegs affixed to the bottom of the aluminum cylinder. Then he started bouncing. He took several small hops, then one massive leap, and his body was airborne. It was at this moment that Smith took his sneakers off the pegs and spun the stick clockwise in front of his face like an airplane propeller, while clearing a horizontal bar positioned 12 feet in the air.
When Smith landed successfully on the other side, he had set the Guinness World Record for highest-ever jump on a pogo stick. And he did it on the Vurtego, perhaps the greatest pogo stick the world has ever seen. “It’s the wand that makes the magic possible,” Smith, now 26, told me this summer.
The spring-loaded contraption that many of us are familiar with was introduced in America shortly after World War I. For almost 100 years, that simple pogo stick didn’t change much. But when two high-school buddies who grew up on surfing, skateboarding, and snowboarding saw a friend messing with his old pogo stick at a party, they got to thinking: Is there any way to reimagine a childhood toy for the extreme-sports world? That’s how Vurtego pogo sticks, named after the Mission Viejo, California, company that has produced them since 2005, were born.
Unlike spring-loaded sticks, Vurtego’s devices are powered by air, with shafts that pump in and out of hollow metal tubes. The air pressure inside a Vurtego stick is easily double the PSI of a standard car tire—which means a single bounce can launch a rider more than eight feet into the air. This innovation gave rise to trick pogo, a niche extreme sport centered on an annual competition called Pogopalooza. But it has also put Vurtego in a challenging position: It has to sell the thing to people who don’t want to whip around at neck-breaking altitudes.
As a business imperative, it’s a conundrum Vurtego has to solve, and one it’ll try doing when it begins selling the Slingshot in September. The Slingshot is a shorter, lighter, easier-to-control pogo, but it’s still powered by air. If the Vurtego is a sports car, then the Slingshot is the sedan anyone can drive. Vurtego says the goal is to attract a wider audience: the kids who want more of a thrill than a spring-loaded stick can provide, but also anyone willing to try something new. Yet the business motive belies a more fundamental question: Why jump on a pogo stick at all?
For Smith, a pogo stick evokes a childhood innocence, a time when the only thing you had to worry about was how high you could jump (and how to effectively bail out if the stick started going sideways). “When you jump on a pogo stick, there’s just no way to not feel like a kid,” he told me. “I feel just alive and young and joyful. It gets your whole body worked up into physical joy.”
Old-school spring-loaded sticks usually bounce just a few feet into the air. The first spring-loaded stick that the Vurtego co-founder Ian Britt was involved in making sent a rider as high as five feet. The inelegant design—two old car shocks that he and a buddy welded together and stuck inside a metal tube—yielded a clunky, 60-pound contraption, but it still enabled a higher bounce. Mutual friends connected Britt with Vurtego’s other co-founder, Brian Spencer, whose uncle, a former aerospace engineer, made the key contribution: air instead of springs. To make a spring stick reach world-record heights, you need metal with a thicker gauge, which weighs it down. Compressed air is lighter and can be adjusted on the fly with a bike pump. That’s what allows for insane height: More air pressure equals more altitude.
The Vurtego stick used by most of the athletes at Pogopalooza is the V4, the latest in the company’s line of trick-pogo equipment. Though the stunts guys like Smith bust out are breathtaking to behold—have you ever seen someone do three backflips on a pogo stick?—the V4 itself is inaccessible to the masses. The cylinder is aluminum, the shaft is heavy stainless steel, the pogo is more than four feet tall from shaft to handlebars, and the price is $499.
By comparison, the Slingshot is $149 or $159, depending on the model size: extra-small or small. Materials that Vurtego was able to access only in the past several years enabled the design. The cylinder in this stick consists of six layers of pressure-rolled aluminum. The shaft is aluminum. The pegs are a special blend of thermoplastic and nylon, with glass-filled fibers inserted for additional strength. The pogo itself is shorter. And unlike the V4, which Smith describes as “super punchy and poppy,” the bounce of the Slingshot, according to those who have tried it, is slow and cushioned.
“It’s a lot less intimidating to start with something like the Slingshot, where it doesn’t look like you’re automatically going to break a bone,” says Will Weiner, the CEO and co-founder of Xpogo, the Pittsburgh-based governing body of trick pogo that hosts the annual high-flying contest. “I really think it’s kind of the missing link we’ve been looking for.”
Getting someone to embrace pogo as a leisure activity seems like a long shot. If anything, the Slingshot appears more suited to the trick-stick wannabes, the younger generation that isn’t ready for the jolt of a larger pogo stick.
And that makes sense. Why give a 10-year-old a pogo stick that’s one errant bounce from sending them face-first into pavement? Britt told me that the Slingshot is just the first of two new pogo sticks that Vurtego plans to roll out. Next spring, the company will release the V5, its newest stick for the Pogopalooza set, which will incorporate the softer, trampolinelike bounce of the Slingshot. In fact, an early test model of the V5 is what Smith used to hit his high-jump mark a year ago.
But what makes the Slingshot a presumably easier pogo stick is the same thing that makes it more than just a set of vertical training wheels for an aspiring back-flipper: Anyone can jump on it. That makes it a gateway into unstructured, nostalgic fun, free from the contemplative pressures that weigh down so much of daily life.
“If you go skiing, most people are on the bunny slopes. There’s not many people that are flying in the terrain park,” Britt said. “Most people just want to go up to the mountain, have a couple beers, and chill and have fun. This is our version of that.”
The reason a new pogo stick might matter is because of how little it matters overall: a little buoyancy in a heavy world. Not long before I observed the scene in Pittsburgh, I’d found out I have a particular type of muscular dystrophy, a degenerative disease that causes my body to progressively break down. I’ll never bounce on a Vurtego or a Slingshot or any of the others, but I can appreciate what they represent. Witnessing pogo stunts in person gave me a newfound appreciation for frivolity.
Smith sees his time on a pogo stick as a bridge into the imagination. He remembers when he first started watching YouTube videos of others doing tricks on pogo sticks, and then trying to emulate what he saw. The act, he says, was like playing a character. “It’s so absurd in a way, but it’s so playful,” he said. “That’s at the root of nostalgia, and feeling young and naive.”
This summer, he spent a couple of months at Legoland in Florida performing in a scripted sports show. He was there with his Vurtego, bouncing on stage as “Mike,” a jackhammer operator. The pogo stick, of course, was the jackhammer.