Morgan Lake interview: What it takes to break two metres and get an Olympic high jump medal in Paris (2024)

By this point, national high jump titles are tradition for Morgan Lake.

She has won the British Championship (outdoor) every year since 2016, the longest run in history. Her most recent title, secured at the end of June, only needed her to clear 1.85m, way off her national outdoor record of 1.97m. It came on a typical Manchester summer’s afternoon: ie, it was raining — suboptimal jumping conditions.

Lake is as honest and responsibility-bearing as athletes come, but allows herself to bemoan “the weather being so bad now. I have no idea what month we’re in”. The second sentence is pure hyperbole. Her last three years have been preparation for Sunday, August 4, the date of the Olympic women’s high jump final in Paris.

She is speaking with The Athletic as part of a British Athletics-backed documentary, Path To Paris: The Hunt For Gold. To produce this, Channel 4 partnered with British Athletics and The National Lottery, the latter having invested over £300million into UK athletics since 1997, where it currently funds over 1,100 elite athletes. The behind-the-scenes documentary follows Lake and eight other elite athletes in their preparations for Paris 2024.

The first Olympics-themed episode airs at 4.55pm (BST) this Saturday, July 20, with the first Paralympics-related edition on August 25, three days before those Games begin in the French capital.

“My main aim is to make that final and just be in that medal fight, I love a championship environment,” says Lake. “I think that’s where I thrive.”

She proved as much on Olympic debut in 2016. Lake jumped a then personal best of 1.94m in qualifying and tied for 10th in the final with a 1.93m jump. As a teenager, and second-youngest competitor in the final at 19, she held her own in Rio de Janeiro — Lake was the first female Briton to make an Olympic high jump final for 24 years (after Deborah Marti in 1992).

It was heartbreak five years later in Tokyo, at the pandemic-delayed 2020 Olympics. Lake jumped a season’s best 1.95m in the qualifying round but injured herself in the process. She had to withdraw from the final.

It is a high jump maxim that an athlete cannot be considered proper until they have cleared a bar set at more than their own height.

Lake first jumped her own height, 5ft 11in (180cm), in July 2012, as a 15-year-old. She was a heptathlete then, with the high jump as her best event among the discipline’s seven. Athletics is cruelly, surgically good at artificially selecting athletes. In 2013’s World Youth Championships, Lake set a British under-17 record with a 1.90m jump during the heptathlon, good enough to win the high jump final itself, but poorer displays in the long jump and javelin meant she ended up nowhere near the medals.

Eventually, she specialised, and championship high jump finals have been better for it. Even if Lake has not had a major medal since a silver at the 2018 Commonwealth Games (1.93m), her clutch jumping ability is spectacular — athletes are eliminated after three consecutive failures, with third-time jumps known as ‘clutch’, as they have to be made to stay in the competition. Since 2016, Lake has made 14 of her 30 clutch jumps in major competitions.

“I didn’t know that,” she says, smiling, when presented with that information. “But it does make sense the way I’ve gone through championships. Especially in Budapest (the World Championships) last year, it was third attempt, (cleared one metre) 94, third attempt (cleared one metre) 97, third attempt at my opening height (1.85m) in qualifying…

“My brain obviously seems to wake up when it knows it has to. I try and get my first time (clearance) every time, but I know, back of my mind, when it’s the third attempt, that is my last chance. If I really want it, I can always guarantee that third attempt is going to be the one.”

Lake’s clutch jumping is a double-edged sword. It keeps her in finals and proves her resilience, but failures can cost her places. If athletes finish level on a height, they are split according to countback — the one with fewer failures finishes higher. It meant Lake missed out on a medal at the 2018 World Indoor Championships, when she jumped as high as she did in winning silver at the Commonwealth Games later that year, and as high as the athletes who took silver and bronze, but ended up fourth because of two failures at her opening height (1.84m).

Realistically, Lake will need a personal best, breaking the two-metre mark, to medal in Paris next month. Only 83 women have ever jumped that high, and 28 of them came along before Lake was even born. More men have broken 10 seconds in the 100m, for comparison.

“I definitely feel like I’m into two-metre shape, which is really nice,” says Lake. “I think the thing about high jump and especially in competition, which is different to other events, you can’t put the bar at two meters and jump it once and then the competition (will) be over. You have to start and build up — it might be seven or eight jumps before you even get to the two-metre mark. It’s staying super-focused on every height. Not every height is guaranteed, just going through the stages. You kind of work up to that two metres”.

Three of her five jumps at 1.97m have been since the start of last year — Lake seems to be timing her build-up to these Olympics just right. “The Europeans were really good for me, in getting my confidence back, making the final, jumping over (one metre) 90 again,” she says, referencing the outdoor championships in Rome last month. “It gave me a lot of confidence going into the rest of this year”.

Lake, who is ranked sixth in the world, needs confidence given the golden age that women’s high jumping is experiencing.

Australian duo Eleanor Patterson and Nicola Olyslagers (then McDermott, who won silver in Tokyo), and Ukrainian trio Iryna Gerashchenko, Yuliya Levchenko and Yaroslava Mahuchikh, have all cleared two metres and boast major senior medals. Mahuchikh, who came third in the previous Olympics, broke the high jump world record with a 2.10m jump in the Paris Diamond League meeting this month — topping a mark that had stood for 37 years.

Mahuchikh’s world record was an exception to the rule that results in competitions can be deceptive indicators in an Olympic year, with athletes competing while trying to maintain training intensity. “We had quite a big training block in winter and going into the summer. At times I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I’m ready to compete right now’. I had a really big strength block and my coach was like, ‘It will come to fruition when it needs to’, in the summer, once the gym (work) goes down — you start peaking,” says Lake.

“I think it was that competition (European Championships) where I was like, ‘Cool, I do feel more prepared’. Then the week after, I jumped 1.93. So I was like, ‘OK, this is definitely going the right direction’.”

Jumping higher requires holistic improvements.

In 2018, Lake changed her run-up from eight to 10 steps, also going from a rolling (moving) start to a standing one. Every jumper has their idiosyncrasies but Lake’s approach to the bar is remarkably efficient and tidy. The main thing that sets her apart is being a right-footed jumper (most are left).

The routine is a lifetime’s work: Standing still at the start, she leans back. The left foot is behind, at an angle, with her right one’s toes pointing to the sky and only its heel touching the floor. She drives her knees as she arcs towards the bar, with increasingly bigger steps, though her form is not as pronounced as the likes of Mahuchikh (who drives her knees particularly high), nor is there excessive arm movement as she jumps (Patterson winds her right arm like a windmill just before take-off).

For Lake, breaking two metres brings bigger challenges mentally than physically.

“The lower heights, you’re just in a bit more of a rhythm — like the heights you’re jumping in training, you’re familiar. Obviously, when the bar gets higher, a little bit of anxiety can creep in,” she says. “I think whenever I’ve jumped my highest bars, I’ve been pretty relaxed. When you’re in a championship environment, that can change, but it’s definitely something I’m trying to work on — keeping that same relaxation through every single bar”.

I point out the two-metre threshold would not just be a personal best (and an improved British record) but likely put her on the podium in Paris. The third-place athlete cleared that height in Tokyo (2020) and at the London Olympics in 2012, and jumped 2.02m at the 2004 Games in Athens — 1.97m at Rio in 2016 was the lowest height to win a women’s high jump medal over the past six Olympics.

Lake, ever-measured, is prepared for anything: “I think knowing that even though we’re probably going to take two metres plus to win a medal, it also might not. So it’s going into the competition with no real height limit. It’s just first attempts, clearing and clearing. I’ve gone into competitions before being, like, ‘I’m going to need only two metres to win this’. I’ve been so focused on that and then the medals have been won at 1.93, 1.95 and it’s, like, ‘Oh wow. If I’d gone into that competition knowing that’s what I had to jump to medal, I might have done differently or come in with a different attitude’. We’ve no idea what it’s going to take (next month).”

If Lake does win a medal in Paris it will be Britain’s first in the women’s high jump since Dorothy Shirley’s silver in Rome in 1960.

What is left for Lake before the competition begins?

“The work is pretty much done, in terms of the hard work and training,” Lake says. “It’s just about sharpening up, getting the technical aspects really honed in, getting (into) that competition environment. Staying healthy, mentally and physically.

“It’s my favourite part of the season, this month going to the Champs, because you’re, like, ‘Oh wow, I can start jumping high again’.”

Watch out for Lake in Paris.

(Top photo: Nigel French/PA Images via Getty Images)

Liam Tharme is one of The Athletic’s Football Tactics Writers, primarily covering Premier League and European football. Prior to joining, he studied for degrees in Football Coaching & Management at UCFB Wembley (Undergraduate), and Sports Performance Analysis at the University of Chichester (Postgraduate). Hailing from Cambridge, Liam spent last season as an academy Performance Analyst at a Premier League club, and will look to deliver detailed technical, tactical, and data-informed analysis. Follow Liam on Twitter @LiamTharmeCoach