Stress Fracture to Gold | Nina Kennedy Heals All Fronts

When Nina Kennedy speaks about being crowned world champion, it is unclear if she is prouder of defeating the world or silencing the self-doubt inside her head. The pole vaulter’s rise to stardom has been so personal that she has played both the hero and the villain in a modern-day rivalry with no one but herself.

All the numbers crunched around Kennedy’s groundbreaking year contextualise her place in history, but conceding she is far from “a stats girl”, the Busselton product shares a personal anecdote which provides an insight into her motives of development and maturity.

“In Tokyo, Katie [Moon] was the Olympic champion and I was watching it in my hotel room thinking that I was never going to be as good as her, and about how all the girls in the final were such fighters and amazing athletes. I genuinely didn’t believe I could be there and now I am the world champion,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy’s newfound self-belief is authentic and contagious, with the Australian record holder reluctant to compare herself to the version that was sent packing in qualification at the Olympic Games two years earlier – instead looking ahead to Paris in 2024.

“I can say this in hindsight but I really didn’t feel like I belonged on the world stage because I didn’t have that self-belief that I could be a good athlete. What I have shown myself now is that I can set a goal and I can achieve it, so why not set them as high as I can?” Kennedy said.

“I have one goal for next year which is to win the Olympics. If something doesn’t add to that goal, I’m not going to do it. If I don’t achieve that it doesn’t make me a bad athlete or a bad person, it just means that I rolled the dice and I lost.”

Beginning her 2023 campaign with a stress fracture off the back of her 2022 World Championships bronze medal, Kennedy salvaged a respectable European campaign up until arriving in Jockgrim, Germany where she found the breakthrough she was looking for.

A result of 4.73m just two weeks out from the World Championships looked innocuous on paper, but it made all the difference for the Olympian who was about to go from homesick to home run.

“Reflecting on the season, everyone who was in my camp the whole time knows that it wasn’t easy. The season was a grind and until Jockgrim, working through European competitions was pretty hard and it definitely wasn’t smooth,” Kennedy said.

“Being such a technical event, we got some big breakthroughs. I got that feeling that I had been searching for all year and rode that wave into Worlds. I knew that I could win and that I was only going there to win. People talk about a state of flow and I was definitely in it for a few weeks.”

Sharing gold in Budapest with the USA’s Katie Moon on countback after clearing 4.90m to add eight-centimetres to her national record and land in the top-10 all-time, the 26-year-old had scaled the mountain - from stress fracture to gold in a matter of months. 

“The biggest difference was having that stress fracture and going back to complete basics, but also having that belief and a really good technical model,” Kennedy said.

“The new gym program made me feel dead for a lot of months, I think that’s why those early competitions were so difficult. As soon as I freshened up and everything fit into place perfectly, those high jumps came together.”

Clearing an Oceania record of 4.91m indoors the week following her World Championships triumph, Kennedy posted her second Diamond League win of the season and the sixth highest jump all-time indoors – driven soley by what success means to her rather than the weight of external expectation. 

Describing her coaching setup headed by Paul Burgess and supported by James Fitzpatrick, Ben Raysmith and World Championships bronze medallist Kurtis Marschall, the world champion simply says she is “obsessed” with her team.

“Our mindset was to learn everything this year so next year it’s just the same. I’m maturing as an athlete and this year coming will be identical. We don’t have any changes in coaching staff and we are going to repeat the same thing, hopefully,” Kennedy said.

“The pressures are going to be totally different because people are going to expect me to win, but I’m enjoying that each season is bringing different challenges.”

Kennedy is set to finish 2023 as the reigning world champion, equal world leader and world rank number two at the age of 26 – a pretty and privileged position to sit in on the eve of an Olympic campaign.

By Lachlan Moorhouse, Athletics Australia
Posted: 19/10/2023