In May, the image was then re-posted by With Leather, a sports blog with a large male fanbase, remarking on the attractiveness of seventeen-year-old Stokke under the headline "Pole Vaulting is Sexy, Barely Legal".

[6] The photographer threatened to sue site owner Matt Ufford if he did not remove the image, but the article had already received significant attention and been posted at dozens of other websites.

Within several weeks, her photos had become such an Internet phenomenon that they generated comment pieces nationally from The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, and internationally from British broadcasters at the BBC,[7] Australian daily The Sydney Morning Herald,[8] and the German weekly Der Spiegel, in addition to more than one million search engine results.

[12] Stokke initially tried to control the situation herself, but after being bombarded with emails and requests for photo shoots, she sought a media consultant to handle her new-found fame.

She gave an interview on pole vaulting technique which was uploaded to YouTube, and it received over 100,000 views, but comments and discussion on the internet largely remained in relation to her looks.

[13][14][15] In their book Technology, Power and Culture in the Network Society, Brett Hutchins and David Rowe linked Stokke's case with that of American soccer players Alex Morgan and Hope Solo, female athletes who were fetishized and saw their public image framed sexually, in a way that the authors said de-emphasized their sporting achievements.

In her first year of competition for the California Golden Bears collegiate track team she broke the school record for a freshman athlete both indoors and outdoors with a vault of 4.11 m (13 ft 5+3⁄4 in).

[2] Stokke had more success in her second year at college, scaling 4.21 m (13 ft 9+1⁄2 in) in Sacramento, California, under the close observation of Cal coach and former five-time All-American at UCLA, Scott Slover.

[2] However, in 2011 Stokke did place eighth at the NCAA Indoor Championships held at Texas A&M, clearing 4.10 m (13-05.25) on her first attempt, which secured All-American status.

Her 2015 best of 4.15 m (13 ft 7+1⁄4 in) (achieved in a third-place finish at the National Pole Vault Summit) was an improvement but still ranked her outside of the top 30 American women that year.

Her 2016 best was eighth at the Chula Vista OTC High Performance Meet with a height of 4.15 m and she improved the following year to 4.27 m for third at the 2017 Austin Longhorn Invitational.