West Australian pole vaulter Kurtis Marschall once likened his sport to space travel.

“You are just the passenger in a rocket ship. And the rocket ship has taken off and you are holding on for dear life,” he described his gravity defying feats to The West Australian in 2023.

Marschall’s opponents might have to hang on for dear life as the vaulter eyes a third successive Commonwealth Games gold medal in Glasgow.

The 29-year-old also has one eye on the Games record of 5.80 metres, set by one of his heroes, fellow Perth vaulter Steve Hooker, in Melbourne 2006.

That shouldn’t be a problem as Marschall cleared six metres for the first time in France in February when he beat the greatest of all time, Sweden’s Mondo Duplantis, in a Diamond League meeting in Stockholm. He repeated the effort in Poland a month later.

Marschall jumped 5.95m in a London Diamond League meeting at the weekend in a perfect tune-up for the Games.

“It was so good to finally do it. I wanted to get it done before I’m in the twilight of my career and I was able to do it when I was 28,” he told The West Australian from Europe last month about his 6m clearance.

“People were telling me once you get through that mental barrier of jumping six metres, you should be able to just do it all the time.

“That’s exactly how I felt. Now when the bar goes to six metres I don’t have that mental stress or any barrier I have to break through.

“I feel like the floodgates are open. When I did it the first time, it wasn’t necessarily anything special either. It was just a good normal, solid jump on a decent sized pole.”

Marschall has switched coaches from his long-time mentor Paul Burgess to another former vaulter Declan Carruthers, who like Marschall grew up in Adelaide before moving to Perth.

Hooker, Burgess and Dmitri Markov are the only other Australians to have cleared the six-metre mark.

Scotland’s Jax Thoir and New Zealand pair James Steyn and Nick Southgate are expected to challenge for podium positions in Glasgow.

The men’s pole vault final will run from 1.30am to 5am on Sunday, August 2 (Perth time).