Christian Olsson (SWE) jumping indoors in Glasgow (© Getty Images)
Two years ago in Lisbon, at the last World Indoor championships, Britain’s newly crowned Olympic Triple Jump champion Jonathan Edwards, then 34 years old, suffered a surprise defeat at the hands of the younger Paolo Camossi (27) of Italy, 17.32 to 17.26 being the deciding performances.
Returning to the present, with the 9th IAAF World Indoor Championships in Athletics due to start on 14 March, while Camossi is not in the Italian team and has not competed recently, Edwards will face a much younger, and more consistent threat in the guise of Sweden’s 23 year-old European outdoor champion Christian Olsson.
It was eight years ago that Christian Olsson first had his sights on Jonathan Edwards. "Yeah," the affable young Swede says, casting his mind back to the afternoon of 7 August 1995, "I was sitting about 15 rows up in the stand, just above the 18m mark."
It’s not a new story but still one that remains worth re-telling, that as a 15-year-old programme seller at the fifth outdoor World Championships, Olsson had finished his duties for the day just in time to get a perfect view of Edwards venturing beyond the World record barrier. Not once but twice, during the course of the men's Triple Jump final, the British athlete broke the sand in a World record, at 18.16m in the first round and then 18.29m in the second.
“It would be a memory for a lifetime,” Olsson muses, “even if I hadn't become a triple jumper and come up against Edwards. “It was such an atmosphere...and the way he did it...twice in the same competition...the whole arena just exploded.”
It must be a disorientating memory to recall. Back in 1995, when those World Championships were held in Gothenburg, his home city, Olsson was an emerging teenage high jumper, a member of the local Orgryte club. Eight years on, he is contemplating the prospect of depriving Edwards of the one major triple jump title he has yet to achieve, and in the great Briton's own backyard.
Since Edwards struck gold at the Sydney Olympics three years ago, he has been beaten on seven occasions by the 6ft 4in loose-limbed Bambi of a Swede who, at the age of 23, is threatening to take over from the long-established master as the fully-fledged world number one of triple jumping. The personal score stands at 10-7 in Edwards' favour, but outdoors last summer it was only 5-4 and indoors this year it is 1-1.
Olsson prevailed in Glasgow on 2 February, Edwards in Birmingham three weeks later. The two are also due to meet in a jumping gala this evening (5 March) in Tallinn, Estonia, but whatever occurs there, a major score is due to be settled at the ninth IAAF World Indoor Championships when they meet again in Birmingham on March 14 to 16, as there is also a global first at stake.
Edwards has won two outdoor world titles, an Olympic gold, European championships indoors and out and a Commonwealth title. He has also set three World records. At 36, though, he has yet to win a World Indoor title.
Olsson has already won a European title at Edwards' expense. Should he emulate his Munich success of seven months ago, he would become the first non-high-jumping Swede to secure a world indoor crown...in a manner-of-speaking, at least. Sweden's three world indoor titles have all come courtesy of high jumpers - Patrik Sjöberg in Paris in 1985 and Kajsa Bergqvist and Stefan Holm in Lisbon in 2001 - and Olsson was a jumper with a head for height rather than distance, when he watched Edwards in the Ullevi Stadium back in 1995.
“I couldn't have imagined that one day I would be a rival of Edwards,” Olsson says. “Back then I was still aiming for the High Jump and Patrik Sjoberg's trainer was my coach. We were waiting for the High Jump, actually, when we watched the triple jump final at those World championships.”
Viljo Nousianen was the Finnish coach who guided Sjoberg - like Olsson, a native of Gothenburg - to two High Jump World records (2.38m and 2.41m), three Olympic medals and an outdoor world title (in Rome in 1987). He also guided Olsson for six years until his sudden death early in the summer of 1999. Two months later Olsson won the High Jump title at the European Junior Championships in Riga, clearing 2.21m. Last February, competing at an indoor meeting in Gotheburg, he high jumped 2.28m. It placed him joint 18th on the World Indoor rankings for 2002.
“I was actually really close with the last of my three attempts at 2.31m,” Olsson recalls. “If I'd got over, it would have broken Patrik Sjoberg's arena record. He was a little pissed off that I almost beat his record, being a triple jumper.”
Olsson may high jump again sometime in the future but strictly "for fun." The Triple Jump has been the serious focus of his attention since 1999 and, after failing to survive the qualifying rounds at the Sydney Olympics, he has established himself as the world number two. He might well have been number one by now, but Edwards, having toyed with the idea of hanging up his spikes at the end of last summer, has decided to jump on.
”I'm very happy that he's continuing to jump,” Olsson says, “because he brings something to the triple jump that no-one else has done for a long time. As long as Edwards is there it will never be a problem to be able to prepare for a competition. You know the result will be a very high standard, just because he is competing.”
There was a very timely reminder of that for Olsson at the Norwich Union Grand Prix in Birmingham on 21 February. He arrived in England's 'Second City' fresh from a world-leading 17.40m jump on home ground in Stockholm - only for Edwards to uncork a 17.44m effort in the first round.
However, when looking ahead to their re-match in Britain's National Indoor Arena, both men will need to remain aware that there are others in the competition too. For instance, last weekend in Boston, 25-year-old Tim Rusan, surprisingly won the USA Championships with a new personal best of 17.45m, the current season’s world lead.
That said both Edwards and Olsson will no doubt remain focused on each other in Birmingham.
Olsson says: "I think there will be more pressure on him than on me, with the World Indoor Championships being in his home country. But Edwards isn't the kind of person you can put the pressure on and he breaks down.”
“He will probably rise to the occasion and jump very far,” perhaps not quite as far as he did, though, with the 15-year-old Olsson watching from the stands in the Ullevi Stadium.
Simon Turnbull for the IAAF
