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.”