News10 Jan 2005


Triple Jump master Olsson seeking new challenges

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Christian Olsson - Jackpot contender - wins in Paris (© Getty Images)

Winner of the TDK Golden League Jackpot, the Olympic Games, the World Indoor Championships and the World Athletics Final, Sweden’s Christian Olsson is now looking for new challenges. As Ed Gordon reports, Olsson is planning to attempt an unprecedented Triple Jump / High Jump double in the near future!

Il faut reculer pour mieux sauter. (It is necessary to recede in order to jump forward better.)

It is not likely that Christian Olsson was familiar with this French proverb as his season progressed through the midsummer weeks, but he’s a firm believer in it now.

Riding the crest of twenty-nine consecutive wins, the lanky Swede arrived at Stockholm’s DN Galan meeting in late July with many things swimming in his mind. Not only was the pride of continuing the win streak at the forefront, but there were also long-term concerns about maintaining the perfection required by the Golden League for another six weeks. And then there was also that three-day diversion in late August known as the Olympic Games.

Stockholm was not part of the Golden League, so some of the pressure would be off, but just for one evening.

With the public’s expectations of his repeated successes being a given, an athlete with Olsson’s star cachet seems to fetch the biggest headlines when the news is negative. As a result, word of his defeat at the hands of Romania’s Marian Oprea that evening spread rapidly via the Internet. The ignominy of losing in front of a home crowd also added to the pain.

“I was pretty flat tonight,” was Olsson’s immediate assessment. He made no excuses but nonetheless regretted the short recovery time of only four days available to him after the Paris Golden League stop.

Six weeks later, in recalling this single season loss on the eve of the Golden League final in Berlin, Olsson could put things into better perspective.

“When I look back on it, I feel that it was probably very good for me,” he admitted. “I was winning and winning, and I couldn’t appreciate it. The loss was a catalyst for my motivation.”

With three Golden League ports-of-call still remaining on his schedule after Stockholm, as well as his Athens appearance, this rediscovered zest for competition was an integral component of his later successes.

“After the Stockholm experience, I could go back and train as if I were number-two again [as in the days of Jonathan Edwards] instead of training as number-one,” he said. “When you train as number-one, there’s only one direction you can go, and that’s down.”

The aftermath of the Stockholm setback is now a part of athletics’ lore. Olsson quickly swept the incident out of his mind and recovered to win his first Olympic title, captured a share of the Golden League jackpot three weeks later, and then closed out his season with a victory at the World Athletics Final in Monaco.

It was only four years ago that the then 20-year-old Swede left behind a seemingly bright future in the high jump to adopt the triple jump as his specialty event. Since then, he has been quick to collect titles and assert himself as that event’s dominant personality, following the equally distinguished reign of Edwards.

A bronze medal at the 2001 World Championships in Edmonton was the prelude to Olsson’s ascent to the top. The following year saw him claim the European Championships crown from Edwards, to go along with a European Indoor title from earlier that season.

In 2003, Olsson captured his first World Championships gold medals as he breezed through both the indoor hall in Birmingham and the Stade de France in Paris virtually unchallenged.

After a second World indoor title in Budapest this past winter, Olsson capped off the gold-medal parade with the Olympic win in Athens, the most coveted title of all. And it made him the first athlete -in any event - to hold all five crowns simultaneously.

As he slowly circled the Olympic Stadium in a victory lap on that August evening, Olsson wasn’t too concerned that he had just ticked off the final box on his list of possible global titles. The emotion of his Athens win kept surging for hours and prevented reality from settling in.

“The ceremony was held the same evening as the competition, instead of being held back to the next day as is often the case,” Olsson recalled. “It’s much different when you have it one day later because everything is much calmer then. I was still feeling the emotions of the competition when I went up on the medal platform.”

After the celebrations Olsson returned to training two days later, only to discover the mental void which often accompanies such a lifetime achievement. 

“My motivation was not at the top of the list,” he admitted. “But still, I did what I needed to do. I still performed well at the training sessions. I obviously was still in shape. I was just trying to maintain my condition for the important upcoming competitions.”

Just how important could those remaining competitions have been for a 24-year-old who had just been crowned Olympic champion? The answer lay in the six-meeting Golden League series and its shared jackpot of one million dollars.

With five series wins behind him and only Berlin’s ISTAF meeting separating him from a big payoff, Olsson joined 400m runner Tonique Williams-Darling as the only candidates still alive as the list of twelve initial winners slowly dwindled to only a pair over the course of more than three months. 
 
He was nearing the end of this Masonic-like series of ordeals, and the challenge of staying in top form from mid-June to mid-September had been daunting.

“It’s not meant to be easy to collect the jackpot,” Olsson affirmed the day before successfully completing the task. “Perhaps that’s why only two of us got through this year. I think that with a shorter time between the competitions, it might inspire more of us to go out there and do well. Right now, I’m very tired mentally.”

Yannick Tregaro, Olsson’s trainer the past four years, assumed the duty of preparing his athlete for the long season head-on. “We were actually quite surprised when the IAAF proposed that the men’s triple jump be a part of the Golden League this year,” said the coach. “‘Again? So soon?’ were our thoughts, because it also had been a featured event in 2002 when Edwards was still competing.”

Still, the opportunity to cash in on the biggest performance payday offered by the sport of Athletics was not one to be passed up, even in an Olympic year.

“The Olympic Games were always Christian’s top priority,” Tregaro continued, “and although I wanted him to succeed in winning part of the jackpot, I didn’t feel that it was important for him to be in top shape for the early Golden League competitions. We were still in heavy training through mid-July, and only after that, when we eased up, did he achieve his top form, right at the time of the Olympics.”

Although Olsson was obliged to balance the Golden League’s demands with his own Olympic goals, Tregaro felt that the situation proved that his jumper could cope with juggling the two objectives.

“Although Christian was very tired after Athens, it was the jackpot that helped him keep his focus in the weeks afterwards.” It was also the experience gained from the 2003 season, a campaign which Tregaro says left Olsson “more burned out than this year,” that provided solutions to the time-management problem in 2004.

“Now this season is over. We can move on,” Tregaro recalls Olsson saying after the World Athletics Final.

With all possible titles safely in his porfolio, Olsson’s only remaining challenges are in the area of performance. The eighteen-metre barrier, seemingly so close two years ago after his European indoor record, has proven to be more elusive than expected.

“It’s a difficult mark to achieve,” Olsson said wistfully near the end of this season, “but I feel I’m getting closer and closer.” His winning 17.79 in Athens, the best outdoor mark of his career, as well as his co-world indoor record of 17.83 this past March both attest to the fact that his jumping frontier is moving steadily onward.

Tregaro harbours no anxieties about Olsson’s future. “Christian is only twenty-four now. He really hasn’t reached his full potential. There are still some improvements he can and should make.” And concerns about motivation are seemingly transient. “Christian is already speaking about 2008,” reports his coach.

Part of Tregaro’s optimism comes from Olsson’s good fortune to remain injury-free in an event which can be unforgiving to knees and ankles. “It’s been due to a little luck, of course,” views Tregaro, “but it’s also because Christian does a long regimen of work during the winter but without overtraining.”

The coach, himself a former high jumper with a PB of 2.17, hopes to maintain Olsson’s keen appetite for the triple jump by bringing his protégé back to his old event. “Next year, we plan to inject a significant number of high jump competitions into his indoor schedule. It’s important to use that as a means of motivation, as a diversion from only training for the triple jump.”

Olsson himself has admitted that he would like to get back to his athletic roots and was anxious to re-admit the high jump to his repertoire after an absence of one season.

“When I jumped 2.28 in [his only high jump competition of] 2003, it surprised me that I did so well. I thought 2.20, 2.25 at best, but I actually almost cleared 2.30,” he recalled. “I felt that the form I had from the triple jump gave me a lot for the high jump. It was just a bit like riding a bicycle for the first time after a number of years. I only did two high jump training sessions in preparation, and I felt like it was already there.”

There’s perhaps another reason Olsson wants to give his old event a re-look. “[Former high jump world-record holder] Patrik Sjöberg tells me that it’s now too late for me to go back to the high jump, and when he says something like that, it makes me even more motivated to prove him wrong!”

Olsson, Sjöberg and Tregaro—all natives of Göteborg—have their eyes on the European Championships which comes to that city in 2006. And the organizers, admittedly with a bit of noblesse-oblige planning, are setting the stage for big headlines. “They’ve changed the timetable so that a high jump/triple jump double is possible,” Olsson said, perhaps showing a little apprehension about the pressure which will come to bear as that summer approaches.

For now, the triple jump remains Christian Olsson’s main event. And for his Göteborg supporters, he has already made public his goal for the 2006 championships: “I want to break the stadium record.”

That is Olsson’s sly, indirect way of referring to the existing World record of 18.29 established by Edwards in winning the 1995 World Championships at Ullevi Stadium.

Olsson was a skinny 15-year-old stadium program vendor at the time, but he remembers the jump vividly. And with an even better vantage point in 2006, he might find history repeating itself. 

Published in IAAF Magazine Issue 4 - 2004

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