Reigning high jump champion talks to Stuart Weir about going for a golden world indoors hat-trick, mastering her technique and removing any limits to her ambition.
The last time Nicola Olyslagers was fighting it out for a world championships gold medal, she also had to overcome a battle with the elements as torrential rain caused delays to the field events at Tokyo’s Olympic stadium.
She emerged victorious from the downpours but, though she can be assured of staying completely dry this time around in Torun, the 29-year-old knows all too well that the task of winning her third consecutive world indoor high jump title will be far from straightforward.
The two-time Olympic silver medallist is on a roll, having won gold in Glasgow in 2024, then in Nanjing 12 months ago, before going on to navigate that aforementioned Japanese monsoon to land her first global honour outdoors.
As if that weren’t enough, 2025 also saw the Australian improve her Oceania record when she cleared 2.04m at the Diamond League final in Zurich. For the woman who has become well known for writing copious mid-competition notes, there were plenty of positives to jot down in her journal. That will be part of her process this year, too, as she faces a field that contains the likes of world record-holder and Olympic champion Yaroslava Mahuchikh in Poland.
How do you assess 2025?
My main goal was to be in the best possible shape for the world championships, and everything else fell underneath that as far as priorities for my performance so it was a delight that the rest of the season seemed to work out very nicely towards that. Having the opportunity to win indoor and outdoor world championships was quite amazing.
You compete indoors and outdoors, in stadia and at street meetings – do you have a preference?
I love a street meet. If you like having crowd interaction, a street meet is incomparably great because you can feel all of the people around you. There is no wind indoors and wind is the hard thing to adjust to. I think indoor surfaces are often more tailored to people who have a strong position at take-off so, if you just purely rely on speed, it’s not going to work as well for you. If you purely rely on your power, it is better but the best jumpers indoors are ones that are really, really strong and very technically correct. Sometimes you can get away with things outdoors, but I feel, indoors, it’s very, very technical.
Do you still get a thrill by clearing two metres or are you past that?
I still get excited for it. My first two-metre attempt and the first two-metre clearance in Sydney [in 2021] was one of the highlights of my life. That was a very, very big moment but I just felt like it wasn’t one perfect jump. I want to do that perfect jump in every environment and in every circumstance. Last year, I wanted to be a two-metre jumper in any conditions and I got to have a few goes of it in street meets, in the pouring rain in Tokyo and indoors. Every time I get over it, it is that really exciting point of: “Okay, we’ve done it again” but I’m trying to learn not to put the bar too low if my personal best could be higher.
How high do you think you can go?
I keep changing as an athlete year by year. Years ago, I wanted to jump two metres and now we’re at 2.04m. My coach has banned me from putting a ceiling on how high I think I can jump because we improve each year, so I suppose what I am working on is just every centimetre higher at a time, just really aiming for it. I know that if you don’t aim for the world record, you won’t get the next centimetre. So if I don’t aim 2.10m plus, I won’t get 2.05m because it really requires you just to go outside of yourself to keep aiming higher and higher.
What ambitions do you have left?
I want to keep jumping higher. As I said, 2.04m is not the ceiling. Beyond that I think I’ve got more Olympics in me and I think there’s a lot more, including more medals. I’ve never competed in South America, so hopefully one day I can do that and I’ve never done a full indoor season. I think that would be wonderful. The world indoor record is 2.08m – that looks quite nice. I don’t know what the next four or five years will look like in the high jumping landscape – we might have multiple world record-holders coming through, you just never know – so I just want to compete and see how high I can push myself until my body tells me it’s time to retire. I want to enjoy the experience and hopefully tick a few things off the bucket list and jump two metres in every kind of conditions, maybe even in snow one day. Who knows? There’s a lot more in the sport for me.
How would you describe your technique?
People like to say that jumpers are either power-based or speed-based. I would say I’m more power-based, but it’s always a spectrum. No one’s completely one or the other. When I won a medal at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, I was more of a speed jumper. I think you can spot a speed jumper based on what they do at the start of the run-up. If they have these little steps running into it, they’re trying to gain as much speed as possible and so that’s what I was doing, but my body didn’t get to the highest heights that I knew were possible.
In 2019, we changed it to be more power-based. We increased the weights in the gym, we made the run-up a lot shorter with fewer steps and tried to be as accurate as possible. And then, over the years, I’ve gradually developed a new run-up where I wasn’t doing these big bounds at the start, but was trying to gain more speed.
I was just running at the start – still accurate, still the same amount of steps, but just trying to increase the speed a bit. My coach likes to say that I’m morphing into a middle-power speed hybrid jumper, which he’s very proud of. I think I’m learning how to unlock certain muscles and certain movements that I haven’t ever been able to do before because I’m getting stronger. My technique gets a little bit different every season because I finally learn how to unlock that new movement that we’ve tried to go for.
Are you competing against other athletes or the bar?
Against the high jump bar. I don’t even aim for placements or medals or things. It’s always about that high jump bar and the more women that are jumping against that opponent with me on the higher heights the better. I mean I would rather jump 2.00m and lose than 1.95m and win! I’d always choose the higher bars.
Tell us more about that famous notebook?
I just like to make notes on my performance. I think I’m more amused at the fact I get interviewed about it more than anything else. I share what is in the notebook and then the headlines are: “It will always remain a mystery of what is truly inside that book”. Everyone’s intrigued because of the mystery of what’s in it. For every photographer, there’s a list of things that people want from competitions and it’s like: “Get a picture of Nicola’s notebook”. I should trademark it!