Isobel Pooley knows no high jump limits after record summer

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/oct/04/isobel-pooley-high-jump-record

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After more than 30 years of rather pedestrian toil, this will be remembered as the year that British women’s high jumping finally took flight. In Oslo in 1982 Diana Davies cleared a bar set at 1.95m and generations of athletes had been looking up to that mark ever since. Finally, after standing for nearly 32 years, it was conquered twice in the space of six months, indoors in February and outdoors in August.

Isobel Pooley came a distant third when Katarina Johnson-Thompson jumped 1.96m at the national indoor championships in February. At the time the height was 5cm above her personal best; in August she too cleared it. “She showed me it was possible,” Pooley says now of Johnson-Thompson.

“Because a record, the longer it stands, everyone gets a mental block about it. We had a collective mental block about jumping the British record and she just went out and thought: ‘You know what? It’s just a number. I can do this.’ And when I watched her do that with such consummate ease, and saw the delight on her face when she realised what she’d done, I wanted a bit of that for myself.”

And now, having claimed a bit of it, she has got her eyes on the rest. “The two of us are going to fight it out and that’s so productive,” the 21-year-old says. “There’ll be more records to come, I can guarantee, from both of us because we’re tussling for that top spot. We’re joint No1, but who wants to be joint No1? Obviously it’s great, but you really want that spot for yourself. We’re going to have a lot of competition in the next few years, because we’re both aiming for the same thing, which is 2m-plus.”

The national record was one of two highlights of the summer for Pooley, who two weeks previously had won a silver medal at the Commonwealth Games with what was a personal best leap of 1.92m. “It’s been beyond my wildest expectations,” she says. “I knew that the Commonwealth Games were going to be a big challenge but also a massive opportunity, so I really homed in on what I wanted out of it, which was a medal. I had in my head an estimation of what sort of height I’d need to jump in order to get that medal, which was about 1.90m. But in the end I cleared 1.92m on my first attempt, just by focusing.”

One of the things Pooley enjoys about her discipline, she says, is that it allows athletes to be sociable even during events. “You’ve got rest time between your jumps when you can cheer on your team-mates and fellow competitors; I enjoy being engaged in the competition.”

Not, though, in Glasgow, where she plugged her ears with her fingers and sung to herself, the better to keep the world out. “The stakes were too high, I couldn’t afford to even risk getting distracted,” she explains.

“I could do one job and that was jump, and luckily that was all I was expected to do – that and a little lap of honour afterwards. And it was so surreal how it happened. I felt like I’d come up from being under water because I’d been so focused, I hadn’t taken anything in – not the crowd, not the occasion particularly. I didn’t experience any of it. It’s only now, watching it back, you think: ‘The crowd was amazing’ or ‘It was nice and sunny’. I didn’t even feel the sun. I was just focused on my one job. It felt like I’d removed the rest of my brain and I could just use my body and that’s all.”

Throughout our conversation words tumble from Pooley like a jackpot from a Las Vegas slot machine. “I like interacting with people,” she says at one point, unnecessarily. “I’m naturally quite a gregarious person. I can chat for England.”

It is not just in competition that she stands out – she is 6ft 3in tall (though at home she is dwarfed by her 6ft 10in father and her younger sister Alice, who is 6ft 5in and on the Team Start programme designed to fast-track potential Olympians into the British rowing squad. “She was scouted,” Pooley says, “because she’s biomechanically amazing.”), has already done some modelling and speaks with unusual fluency. She is, in short, a couple of major medals away from serious stardom.

“This year I think I’ve definitely learned the belief systems that you have to have in place to perform on a major stage,” she says. “Because it’s not really about adding anything particularly, it’s just about making your self-belief so solid that it’s not going to fall away at any moment. You need to go out there and be brimful of confidence and have a real resolute determination that you’re going to get on that podium, you’re going to win that medal, because it’s yours for the taking. That was completely new and completely alien to me.

“I felt so positive before the Commonwealth Games, and after that the floodgates opened and I thought: ‘I’ve jumped a PB now and I’m no longer limited by this barrier, so I’m just going to jump as high as I can and enjoy myself.’

“The key in high jump is confidence, the confidence to have a go. If you do yourself down, which I’m prone to do, then you’re never going to progress. All I’ve done this year is really to set myself free from those limiting beliefs and just go forward with confidence and stick it to a few people, and not be afraid to do so. I think my opportunities are now limitless.”