Highlights - Isinbayeva misses out on medal at 2009 World Championships Double Olympic pole vault champion Yelena Isinbayeva is to miss July's European Championships in Barcelona and will not compete again this season. Isinbayeva announced in April that she was to take an indefinite break from the sport after failing to win a medal at March's World Indoor Championships. "Yelena started training at the end of June," said her coach Vitaly Petrov. "We knew she wouldn't be ready [to compete] at the European Championships which start at the end of this month." The world record-holder has struggled over the past 12 months, missing out on medals at the World Championships last August and March's World Indoors.  | Nothing has changed with my long term goals which includes the 2011 and 2013 World Championships and the Olympic gold in London |
Isinbayeva, 27, won gold at the 2004 Olympics in Athens and a year later became the first woman to clear the five-metre mark in Helsinki. Gold medals at the 2005 and 2007 World Championships followed before she successfully defended her Olympic crown at the 2008 Beijing Games. In the same year, she also completed a hat-trick of World Indoor victories in Valencia. In 2009, she became the first woman to vault over five metres indoors at a meeting in Donetsk, and was named the Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year. At the World Championships in Berlin that year, though, she failed to achieve a successful vault as Pole Anna Rogowska took her crown. She bounced back from that disappointment by setting a new outdoor world record of 5.06m in Zurich but could only manage 4.45m at the World Indoors in Qatar in March as Brazilian Fabiana Murer took gold. "After three-and-a-half months of rest she'll need two months to get back her competitive form so we decided not to rush things, not to take any risks," added Petrov.
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