18-year-old Allison Stokke, a senior and track athlete at Southern California’s Newport Harbor High School, has pole vaulted almost overnight from normal teenage student to hot internet celebrity… It all started with this picture of Stokke, snapped by a track and field journalist, showing her idly fixing her hair at a track meet in New York and posted as part of a report on a California prep track website. While the photo only caught the attention of a few pole vaulting geeks initially, a sports blogger later picked up the photo, along with several others, and quickly helped to skyrocket the future UC Berkeley freshman to Internet stardom. In the coming days, Stokke’s photos were plastered across dozens of admiring fan websites, facebook groups and myspace pages. A three-minute video of her was posted on YouTube (garnering over 750,000 views) and her story even made the front page of the Washington Post. Stokke, who took fourth place in yesterday’s state pole vault finals, says she now tries to avoid leaving her house alone, and that she gets gawked at in coffee shops. “Obviously, I’m not very happy about it, and if I could do something about it to stop it or slow it down a little bit, I’m going to do that,” she said. While Allison and her family may be upset from the unsolicited notoriety, it appears she is happily dating a douchebag.
