In April, on the final day of the national titles in Adelaide, the Australian high jumper Nicola Olyslagers did something unusual. Having defended her championship crown by clearing 2.01m, with competitor Eleanor Patterson bowing out at 1.99m, Olyslagers could have called it a day and soaked in the success. If she wanted another attempt, she could have tried to equal her personal best, at 2.03m, or even beat it, at 2.04m.
Instead, the Tokyo Olympics silver medallist lifted the bar by a full five centimetres, to 2.06m. It was a bold move, a statement in the lead-up to the Paris Olympics. It was not to be – Olyslagers could not quite cleanly clear the height. But it suggested that the 27-year-old will not be constrained by incremental improvement.
“I did 2.01m and got the competition record, so that was great,” Olyslagers tells Guardian Australia by Zoom from her home on the New South Wales central coast. “But when I won indoors [last year’s World Athletics Indoor Championships], I had thought the next step was to go a few centimetres up, but I realised that the emotions had got to me and it was so difficult to focus and push myself to jump.”
Olyslagers reflected with her team, and realised that in those crunch moments, she needed to go higher, to push herself to the limit. “When you attempt a personal best, you just have some extra focus, some extra strength, and you really go for it,” she says. “So my plan was always that, if I won, I would go from 2.01m to 2.06m, to get myself into that mindset. I’m trying to push myself. If I back out of doing something big, I’ll miss out.”
The women’s high jump world record was set at 2.09m by Bulgaria’s Stefka Kostadinova back in 1987. Few have come close to that mark since. Olyslagers admits that attempting 2.06m was “a little bit intimidating, when I saw how high it was”. But she takes heart from the effort. “My second attempt, I felt my whole body get over it – I was just too close [to the bar]. So now I know what I need to work on.
“I’m really thankful that I did that. There’s a potential I could have cleared 2.04m at the Australian championships but that wasn’t my goal. My goal was to challenge myself, to get used to doing big increments.”
Olyslagers (née McDermott) burst into the public consciousness three years ago at the Tokyo Olympics, with her effervescent attitude and striking habit of taking notes in a diary between each jump. During competition Olyslagers would sit down, retrieve her pen and paper, and score aspects of her jump out of 10. When she won the silver medal her successful jump earned full marks. “There were a few nines but overall I rounded up – I gave it a 10,” she said at the time.
It is a technique Olyslagers has continued in subsequent years, recalibrating the scale as she has continued to improve. Her personal best-breaking 2.03m warranted a 10 out of 10, but she says that “what would have been a 10/10 jump for me at the Tokyo Olympics maybe isn’t a 10/10 jump any more”.
The journalling serves an important purpose. “The reflection part is so important to me,” she says. “In between jumps there can be anywhere from a few minutes if I’m the only one left, or there’s just one other jumper – but if there’s 10 jumpers left, it could be 15 or 20 minutes between jumps. Being able to write it down is a way to switch off, save my energy, relax and rest and reset for the next jump. It’s the process that is the powerful part, as much as what I write down.”
Another central aspect of Olyslagers’ athletics career is her faith. The high-jumper co-founded a Christian ministry group, Everlasting Crowns, for fellow athletes. She jumps with a gold cross necklace.
“My faith and Jesus is the reason I’m in sport,” she says. “I would not have made it here, and been able to navigate the highs and lows, without faith as my anchor. In sport, when you’re doing well, everyone wants to know, everyone loves you. When you don’t do well, everyone starts blaming you. It can be super challenging and lonely.”
Before 2017 Olyslagers’ identity was wrapped up in sport. “It was always No 1 for me, so if my performance wasn’t good, I wasn’t good.” She says following her faith in the subsequent years has been life-changing. “I decided to pursue God more than my sport, and find my whole worth in Him. It was an anchor for my soul – no matter what happened, I could always stay true to who I was, to what God says of me.”
In this way, Olyslagers’ faith has helped her through her sporting journey – and it is now helping her to even higher heights. “Believing I can go higher than I’ve ever thought I could go requires me to have faith,” she says. “I wanted to be a two-metre jumper my whole life – and now I’m doing that in most competitions. So it’s like – what’s next? Because I know that no gold medal will add or take away my value, that I’m loved by God, I can just continue going through it and enjoy the journey.”
With the Olympics barely two months’ away, Olyslagers will shortly leave Australia to begin preparations – starting with outings at the Diamond League in Sweden in early June, then a string of competitions across Europe in the lead-up to Paris. “I’m feeling great,” she says. “I’ve come off my best season strength-wise. It doesn’t scare me [that the Olympics are so close]. I’m embracing it – I can’t wait to get overseas and see what’s possible.”
As the reigning indoor world champion, silver medallist in Tokyo and bronze medallist at last year’s world championships, Olyslagers will be among the favourites when her discipline takes centre-stage in early August. But the Australian says her focus will be on personal improvement rather than a gold medal.
“In Paris my goal is to do a personal best,” she says. “For me it’s all about the height, the number. If I do a personal best and come 10th, I’ll be stoked. I want to do something I’ve never done before. That goal, that mindset, has taken my eyes off my competitors and helped me focus on my own training. When other girls are jumping high, past my personal best, I’m happy for them – it means more people are pushing me to go higher.
“So with the Olympics I haven’t been looking at my competitors as barriers to my achievements – they’re actually helping me get the best out of myself,” she says. “I know I perform well when everyone else is performing well.”
Athletes often say such things, and not always convincingly – they are platitudes, shields to the risk of public disappointment. But whether Olyslagers finishes first or fifth in Paris, there is a sense that personal achievement truly does means more to her than medals. Whatever the outcome, she will find strength in her notebook and her faith.
But would a gold medal deserve a new scale in the notepad? “You know,” she says, “I haven’t even thought if there’s an 11/10.”
