After a season in which he won 18 of his 19 competitions, captured Olympic gold and banked half of the Golden League million dollar jackpot, what will triple jump World champion Christian Olsson do as an encore in 2005?

To keep things interesting, perhaps a return engagement to his first love: the high jump.

“I've been speculating about it but I still haven't decided how seriously I want to take it,” the 24-year-old Swede said, before adding without hesitation, “But I will never leave the Triple Jump.”

Just a few years prior to his coming out party at the 2001 World Championships in Edmonton, where he finished runner-up to World record holder Jonathan Edwards, Olsson made his first splash internationally in the vertical jump.

1999 European Junior champion at High Jump

He won the European junior title in 1999, leaping 2.21. Among the vanquished in Riga that summer was the future two-time World Indoor silver medallist and reigning European champion Yaroslav Rybakov. Olsson showed promise as one of six juniors to jump 2.22 that year, but at the same time improved dramatically in the Triple Jump to a 16.30 national junior record that summer as well.

“I was up there fighting with the best [in the High Jump], but I was also pretty good at the Triple Jump. Improvement came much faster in the Triple Jump, and I felt that I gave the Triple Jump a shot already in the [2000] Olympic Games. So, I just wanted to see where it would take me. And it took me very, very far.”

He was a distant 17th in Sydney, the final time he would be a footnote in the event he would come to dominate less than three years later.

2.28 Personal Best from 2003

He can boast a 2.28 personal best from 2003, an effort that, on paper, would have landed him onto the pit for this year’s Olympic final.

“I was really surprised that I could do that good,” he said of his PB from a meeting at home in Bastad. “I thought maybe [2.]20; [2.]25. When I almost cleared 2.30 I was really surprised. But I also felt like one jump was 2.10 and the other was 2.30. I had no security in my jumping.” But he also recalls little difficulty adjusting to the High Jump apron at that meeting.

“It was a little bit like riding a bike,” said Olsson, who began high jumping when he was ten. “I did a few training sessions before the competition and I felt like it was already there.”

Olsson admits that adding his first event to his competitive repertoire is intriguing, but he doesn’t want it to take away from his specialty.

Similar training

“The training is similar when it comes to the basics - explosiveness, the lifting. It's just the technique that's different. I’m just a little worried that if I do this it'll put a little bit too much strain on the body to do both.”

Olsson knows that he would need a hefty improvement, along with tremendous consistency to become competitive in the vertical leap. “That's a very long, long way to go. And I think I still have a lot of improvement to do in the Triple Jump. The question is, do I want to take away the focus from the Triple Jump and maybe not jump 18 meters, or something like that, or put myself in a position where I will be in fifth or sixth place in the Triple Jump because I’m not focusing enough on the Triple Jump?”

How seriously he’ll approach the idea may come when he resumes training this fall.

Doesn't want to lose focus on 18 metres barrier

“I'm not sure,” he said, seemingly weighing options and simultaneously visualizing a variety of scenarios. “I'm not sure what I want to do. I think it also all depends on how my motivation is in training this fall in the Triple Jump. It depends on whether I feel a loss of motivation, and I need a new challenge. So I can go to training sessions and train like I'm number two again. And if I take up the High Jump,” he said, smiling, “I will train like number 50. And I think maybe that's good.”

Yet to Olsson, nothing seems an impossibility, not even a victory over compatriot Stefan Holm, the Olympic High Jump champion who finished 2004 unbeaten in 22 competitions.

“I'd like to defeat him,” he said, again smiling. “I think I've beat him twice, or three times. So I've done it before.”
 

Bob Ramsak for the IAAF