It was as the click heard around the world … just not so loudly in Australia.
It was a click that high jumper Nicola Olyslagers had never heard before, and the chase was immediately on to find it again.
Nicola Olyslagers is in fine form ahead of the Maurie Plant athletics meet in Melbourne on Thursday.Credit: Eddie Jim
It was the click of things falling into place in a way they had not done so before last month in Canberra, when Olyslagers cleared 2.03 metres and set a new national and Oceania record for the high jump.
She didn’t just skim over the bar, there was daylight. Had the bar been set at world record height, she might have cleared that too.
It caused barely a ripple around Australia because it was the same day that 19-year-old sprinter Torrie Lewis became Australia’s fastest woman. In the rock-paper-scissors of athletics news, sprinting beat high jump.
The news, however, of Olyslagers’ effort sent a shiver around the high jumping world. This early in the season, the Australian had laid down a mark looking ahead to Paris 2024.
Nicola Olyslagers flying high at last year’s world athletics championships in Budapest.Credit: AP
Perhaps not coincidentally, four days later Ukrainian Yaroslava Mahuchikh – the reigning world champion and the woman who won bronze behind Olyslagers’ silver in Tokyo 2021 – jumped one centimetre higher.
Olyslagers has always taken an interesting attitude to competition. When another athlete jumps higher than her, the 27-year-old doesn’t consider that she has been overtaken. She sees it as her rivals helping her to jump higher. By that reckoning, Olyslagers and Mahuchikh helped each other.
How Olyslagers came to suddenly jump higher now than before, and felt her jump click in a way it had not before, might have nothing to do with high jumping at all.
To get better at high jumping she became a gymnast. Sort of. OK, not really at all. But her coach did get her to start learning gymnastics and incorporating gymnastics moves into her training. To be clear, gymnastics is not normally the preserve of willowy 186-centimetre women, but suddenly, she was doing backflips, handstands, and clambering around on ropes.
“That is the first time I have done that. Something completely out of my comfort zone and I found it has given me strength being in a different environment where I am very average,” she said.
“Even if it is just for me to get a better profile over the bar that can be centimetres and centimetres [difference].
“We have paused the gymnastics at the moment, but we were working on backflips, handstands, upper-body work, which for high jump it’s quite difficult to do because your upper body can’t be too heavy and bulky or it changes the profile over the bar, but you need to be able to work your arms in a way to direct you.”
It was part of a training review in which she wanted to keep doing what she was doing last year because it was working (she finished third at the world championships last year in Budapest, with fellow Australian Eleanor Patterson claiming silver), but also search for new things that would make her better again.
“We have been doing rope work and flipping and handstands. As a 27-year-old, it’s like I am in kindergarten again. It’s like bringing that childlike fun into the sport again.”
She has also worked on getting faster to go higher. Not a naturally quick runner, she had always been a high jumper who used power in her spring and natural height to get over the bar. Other high jumpers run fast to get velocity. Now Olyslagers is trying to be a hybrid jumper and combine more speed with her powerful spring.
So, back to the Australia Day long weekend. Olyslagers went to Canberra with the expectation of a small crowd and a big jump.
“My team was literally having the conversation before: ‘OK, if you are in world record shape, are you definitely going to do it in Canberra? Don’t you want to save it for when you have a crowd cheering you on?’” she said.
“And I went, you know what, if I am in the shape to do something, then I need to be true with myself that, if I am able to do it, I do it. I don’t wait until that special moment or that recognition because, for me, the joy is the jumping itself.”
The world record of 2.09m was set by Bulgarian Stefka Kostadinova in 1987, while Mahuchikh set her personal best jump of 2.06 in 2021. Patterson, the 2022 world champion, has a PB of 2.02.
“The difference of the 2.03 jump was something happened in that jump that I haven’t been able to do before with the speed and the power. I hit it and I flew, and it was miles over the bar and I haven’t really cleared a bar like that before,” Olyslagers said.
“In Tokyo [at the Olympics in 2021] the bar was nice to me – it wobbled and stayed – this one there was daylight, and so then when I was doing the 2.05 I was trying to find that position again.
“Each jump I attempted at 2.05 I didn’t quite hit it, but I looked at it and I didn’t look at how high the bar was or how hard it was … It was the first time I have looked at 2.05, and it has looked small to me. I realise I need more competitions to know how do I get that 2.03 jump where I really hit it because I know I can jump so much higher if I can replicate that.
“I know the rhythm of it but [it’s about] being able to execute it. I don’t have enough competitions this season to be able to replicate that jumping endurance. I need to attempt the 1.90m like the 2.03m each time because that’s the way I am going to go higher.”
In world-record shape, Nicola Olyslagers will jump on Thursday night at the Maurie Plant Meet at Albert Park.
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