Athletics
Vashti Cunningham: A High Jump Queen Coloring Life Outside the Lines.
The rising US Track & Field star and aspiring creative director invites us into her world.
Vashti Cunningham (pronounced VASH-tie) rocks gently back and forth, a hand resting on each hip forming her spindly arms into perfect triangles. As the announcer at last month’s USA Track and Field Olympic Trials in Eugene, Ore., reads her accomplishments—world leader, 2016 indoor champion, 2016 Olympian and a gold-medal favorite for Tokyo this year—Cunningham squints into the sun. A beam of light captures the gems applied beneath the heavy kohl rimming her eyes, causing them to sparkle. Standing next to her is Amina Smith, a former ACC champion and current assistant jumping coach at Maryland, who bows in praise. She claps enthusiastically for her competitor, right along with the cheering crowd. Cunningham catches a glimpse of Smith’s gesture and her glossy lips bend into a restrained grin. Appreciative to have earned the respect of a longtime competitor, sure, but fully aware of the work to be done.
Cunningham lets her mouth fall into repose. She waves toward the crowd and blows a two-handed kiss. Then, she returns to focus—stares down her prey, the bar, with laser-like intensity. She smooths the sides of her crown—a lionesque mane of dark coils barely held back by a white headband—and rocks backward. Then, she takes off, her long-legged stride accelerating her along a J-curve. She plants at an angle and leaps backward over the bar off one foot.
Cunningham arches her back as she goes over, every muscle under the masterful control of a mind trained in both precision and artistry. In the air, her mind registers suspended reality—a blip in time, temporary quiescence—that ends only after she clears the bar and lands in the pit. With a 6-foot-1 and 123-pound frame, even a roll up from the pit foam appears graceful. And Cunningham—the reigning queen of the U.S. high jump since she was a teenager—returns to her starting point for the next leap.
Another jump, another step toward what she hopes will be world domination at the Tokyo Olympics.
Vashti in full flow
© Damien Noble Andrews / Red Bull Content Pool
Cunningham, 23, was born Jan. 18, 1998 and inherited at birth a very special name that would become her crown. In middle school, her parents told her that the name Vashti means beautiful. But as Cunningham got older, she came to know more—that she was named after Queen Vashti in the Bible. In defense of her own righteousness, Queen Vashti stood up to her husband, the King, though by doing so she risked losing everything.
“When I first heard it, I was the young girl who was not really necessarily rebellious, but just doing what I think is right,” Cunningham said during a Zoom call from her Las Vegas home on July 7. Her German shepherd, Saint Mango, was snoozing in the background. “And so I feel like the name and the story just matched up with who I am, perfectly. Like, her being dethroned and being kicked out because she didn’t want to dance in front of him and his men. And she didn’t want to do what her husband, the King, wanted her to do. I really, really connected with it because I feel like I’m the same way. I’m not going to do anything that I don’t feel is right. Or, you know, that just doesn’t sit well with myself. I’m very true to my morals and things I believe.”
I’m not going to do anything that I don’t feel is right. Or, you know, that just doesn’t sit well with myself. I’m very true to my morals and things I believe.
Cunningham attends church at Remnant Ministries in Las Vegas. Her father, retired NFL quarterback Randall Cunningham, is the senior pastor and her mother, Felicity De Jager Cunningham, a retired dancer with the Dance Theater of Harlem, is the women’s pastor. According to the church’s website, Remnant Ministries is, “a non-denominational, multicultural fellowship that believes Jesus receives all who repent and believe in Him.” And Cunningham—as daughter, athlete and parishioner—has gained valuable lessons about faith from her father.
“I think the biggest lesson that I’ve learned from him is to put God first in my life and completely trust him,” she explained. “I’ve seen his success and I’ve heard the stories of what he would do in certain situations, and just when things came his way. I think that it’s very, very obvious that God is just so real and so evident in his life. I really took that from him.”
Vashti Cunningham
© Damien Noble Andrews / Red Bull Content Pool
A three-time defending U.S. outdoor champion as of the U.S. Olympic trials in June, and the reigning three-time U.S. indoor champion, Cunningham is chasing a world record that was set more than a decade before she was born. On Aug. 30, 1987, Stefka Kostadinova of Bulgaria set the world standard with a jump of 2.09 meters (6.86 feet). Russian high jumper Yelena Slesarenko, at the 2004 Athens Games, set the current Olympic record of 2.06 meters (6.76 feet). And, heading into Tokyo, Yaroslava Mahuchikh of Ukraine leads the world with 2.03 meters (6.67 feet).
Cunningham, meanwhile, qualified for the Tokyo Olympics with a jump of 1.96 meters (6.43 feet), but has jumped much higher this year: 2.02 meters (6.62 feet) at the Chula Vista Field Fest in Chula Vista, Calif., this past May. Whether she can leap an additional 0.07th of a meter (0.23rd of a foot) to tie Kostadinova’s record, or go a little higher to set a new one, is yet to be seen. But, having competed in the 2016 Rio Olympics where she finished 13th, Cunningham enters the Tokyo Games with experience on her side.
“My mindset this year compared to 2016 is just very evolved and matured from the place that it was five years ago,” she said. “I was like a little bit nervous going into it, being the youngest in the event. And I feel like now I’ve had so much time to grow myself, mentally and physically, and technically be able to go out there more confident than I was.” And Cunningham used to her advantage the one-year, pandemic-caused postponement of the Tokyo Games. “I was pretty successful in that aspect of using the moment of things being down,” she said.
At the time of our Zoom call, Cunningham had been navigating media commitments stemming from her win at the U.S. Olympic Trials. “A lot of people kind of want to talk to me and want me to just do ad things, going into the Olympics,” she said. “I’ve been a little bit overwhelmed, but I’m just really enjoying it at the same time.”
Unlike her father, Randall, Cunningham is new to public visibility—acclimated to the scorching temperatures of her hometown, Las Vegas, but not yet to the heat of media scrutiny. “I think I was just really not as comfortable with being under the spotlight, having people kind of watching my moves, and wanting to know what I’m doing,” Cunningham said. “And, you know, when I’m going to be at this track meet, when I’m going to be at that track meet. I just feel like I was not really expecting it to move the way it did and to feel the spotlight like I did at that time.”
By design, Cunningham has competed in meets sparingly and her training and entire path into professional track-and-field competition have been unconventional. For starters, she turned pro right out of high school, foregoing the collegiate ranks where she was unlikely to face much competition. And to prevent injury and preserve her body, Randall has his daughter jumping in competitions 10 or fewer times per year, and he has her jumping with similar infrequency in training, which focuses more on strength-building than leaping. Cunningham has said she does strength work five days per week, with jumping scheduled only once or twice per month. And she likes where she is with both mental and physical preparation heading into the Olympics.
“I am very excited to go and compete,” Cunningham said. “I’m just happy to have this time right now to go back to train and just get stronger and clean up the areas that I feel like I need to. I’m working on my strength. I do a lot of strength training but, really, like myself mentally. I just want to keep getting myself stronger so that I can feel that confidence when I get there.”
One player who won’t be competing in Tokyo alongside Cunningham is Sha’Carri Richardson, the dazzling winner of the 200-meter dash who was disqualified after testing positive for THC at the trials. And renewed mandates for South African runner Caster Semenya to alter her body’s natural composition, chemically or surgically, to lower her testosterone in order to compete in women’s events remains a pall over track and field. But Cunningham side-stepped the invitation to weigh in on these topics, choosing instead to avoid even the potential of causing harm.
“A lot of people are offended by opinions and that’s just the last thing that I am here for is to offend people with my opinion,” Cunningham said. “So, I’m just really looking forward to the track meet, to the actual competition, and just being able to go out to the Olympics after sitting out for a year and not really knowing if anything was going to come.”
Well, the Olympics are here now—beginning on Friday, July 23, and scheduled to end on Sunday, Aug. 8. But because of Japan’s ongoing efforts to control its coronavirus outbreak, the Games will be played without spectators. That means Cunningham can bring only her coach, Randall, to Tokyo; her mother and siblings will have to stay home. It is an unusual turn that Cunningham will navigate, just as she has waded through the whole of her unconventional career. She has had to strike a balance between training like the professional she is and carving out personal autonomy within the athlete-coach relationship that exists with Randall. She additionally has had to reckon with the media attention heaped on her as a teenager that she did not always find warranted or wise, given her greenness.
“I was so young, so I didn’t really feel like—I felt like you guys shouldn’t be watching me or trying to keep up with me,” she said.
Cunningham also was reckoning with her status as a professional athlete against the whole of who she is as a person: deeply religious, innately creative and compelled toward artistic expression.
“I was just trying to navigate how I was going to be the person I am at the same time as the person that people expect me to be,” she said.
So, who is Vashti Cunningham?
“I would describe myself as a creative person,” she said. “Somebody who’s just looking at the world from a creative standpoint, wanting to capture it.”
The it would be the art of the mundane and the beauty of everyday experiences. Photography is Cunningham’s go-to artistic medium, but snapping photos is the end of the process for her, not the beginning. “It’s not just taking pictures of stuff,” Cunningham explained. “There’s set design, creating the whole vibe, finding the location, choosing the outfit and the makeup and the hair.”
Her Instagram is a gallery of her work: outfits fashioned from thrift store finds and high-end designs, hair and makeup self-styled for portraits against the bright lights of Las Vegas, the concrete of city life or the cacti and sand of the surrounding desert. Sometimes, she employs the assistance of friends, but usually it’s just her and her camera. But she has enjoyed her collaboration with Red Bull. “I was really loving the opportunity to use their photographers and bring my own outfits,” she said.
Cunningham gains inspiration from her contemporaries: Kenneth Cappello, a noted advertising photographer and image-taker of musicians like Billie Eilish, Jaden Smith and Chloe x Halle, and Alex Hondo, a mixed-media artists and friend of Cunningham whose work evokes the urban busyness and crown symbology of Basquiat, but centered on the female experience and form. Cunningham says her home is filled with Hondo’s art.
“She’s someone that I’ve been friends with for a long time,” Cunningham said, of Hondo. “And I really love the artwork.”
She loves Basquiat, too; her Pinterest includes the late painter’s works in a folder called “Art,” and she has a tattoo of his famous crown—in red—on her left bicep, plus a giant letter “V,” also in red, on her left hand. But don’t dare mimic the self-described “high jump princess.” Cunningham is protective of the self she is creating, even as she shares herself—and herself as a work of art—with the world.
Cunningham’s foray into art dates back to childhood.
“I got into art when I was in elementary school,” she explained. “It was not necessarily just seeing art and just wanting to paint. I was just always doodling, or sketching something. I was just always doing something, drawing on myself or drawing on some paper in a book or something.”
And just as her father’s decision to put her on the track to help channel some of her wild energy unlocked her athletic talents, her mother’s choice to enroll her in summer art camps unveiled her artistic ones.
“I was always learning how to paint and use chalk, you know, and learning all these different things,” Cunningham said. “And then when I got to middle school and my mom got me a camera, I took an elective of photography. So, it’s like a different outlet of me being creative than just putting a brush onto canvas or pen on paper. It was just a different outlet of my creativity, and then it got into fashion when I got into high school and middle school, and then now it’s like everything coming together—me trying to be the full creative director of my own shoots and stuff like that.”
Cunningham already has walked a runway, and she is eager to do it again. With a physique most designers would appreciate, she will likely attract additional opportunities to work in the fashion industry. But a career as a model is not what Cunningham is after, even if it is something she enjoys for a time. Her ideal profession, she says, is behind the camera, as a photographer.
“I want to work with National Geographic,” Cunningham said. “So that’s, like, my ideal life after track, is to be traveling and just being able to capture things, the way that I see them, and make money for it. I really love Nat Geo. I watch it all the time and I really just aspire to be a photographer of theirs.”
Vashti Cunningham shares her love for animals and disposable film.
© Vashti Cunningham
Vashti Cunningham shares her love for animals and disposable film.
© Vashti Cunningham
Vashti Cunningham shares her love for animals and disposable film.
© Vashti Cunningham
Vashti Cunningham on disposable film.
© Vashti Cunningham
In terms of locations, Cunningham seeks a return to her mother’s native South Africa.
“When I was younger, I was not necessarily bringing my camera with me everywhere,” she said. “I really want to go back there. I also want to go to Thailand. I want to go to see tribes. I’m really into tribes and the people who are not modernized yet. I really want to be able to go and find those remote places where there’s life, but they haven’t really conformed to what we are now. I definitely think there’s a lot to learn from those people even though, to the blind eye, it may seem like we’re so advanced and we have the upper hand over them. I think there’s a lot of basic and simplistic things to learn from people who, you know, are not modernized. Like, the true ways of living. Like, when God made this Earth, there was no skyscrapers or casinos or anything that I’m surrounded by. It was just life and people were living off of the land.”
When Cunningham arrives in Tokyo later this month, she will be inundated with sights and sounds of modern living. Against that backdrop and the ceremony of the Olympic Games, she will rely on her practiced precision. She will create the jump in her mind’s eye in similar fashion to how she creates a photo shoot. She will hold that image and trust her body to carry out the functions it has been trained to perform. Fans will not be in the stands, but she will be the subject of countless camera lenses and those images and videos will be broadcast worldwide. If successful in winning the gold—or, better yet, breaking Kostadinova’s record—Cunningham could find herself in rare air. She could attract the kind of media scrutiny Randall experienced during his NFL career. And it would become one more thing for Cunningham to learn and adjust to, like a high jump, that doesn’t come naturally.
“I’m pretty quiet and to myself,” she said. “But, at the same time, I do enjoy the opportunities that come.”
Rest assured, Cunningham will handle those opportunities in her own unique way—guided by her values, like her Biblical namesake, and shaped with artistry and precision.