The book of Nicola: Behind the faith, and inside the journal, of Australia’s new world champion

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You could write a book on Nicola Olyslagers and her high jumping. Actually, she already has.

Australia’s newest world champion has chronicled every jump she has ever taken in small diaries. She adds notes about her jumps and bits of whimsy. She draws pictures of her jumps while she is competing. She clears a height and scurries over to make a note. She’s as known for the book and her faith – the book is inscribed with “For His Glory” on the front – as she is for jumping very high.

Nicola Olyslagers writes in her book on her way to winning the world title in Tokyo.

When she clicked with her first two-metre jump on Sunday night she knew she had nailed a tweak in technique she had been working on and so drew a stick figure in her book of her going over the bar at just the angle she had wanted.

When the rain came hosing down in Tokyo during the final, and athletes sheltered under too-small umbrellas and towels and scurried on and off the track, Olyslagers looked back at her notebook.

She had cleared all heights at this point and was leading the world championships, but the weather was a new disruptor. All the other athletes, she felt, were changing what they were doing trying to adjust for the conditions. Her book told her not to.

When she won the lucrative Diamond League recently in Lausanne, she did it in the sheeting rain. So she flicked back to her notes and the book reminded her what to do.

“The lesson that we learned from Lausanne was that you don’t change anything when it rains. And that’s what my competitors tried to do. They tried to add a bit of extra effort and I learnt that in Lausanne, and unfortunately, I did that as well for the 202 [centimetre jump in Tokyo that she missed], but I’ll make sure that when it’s raining again in the future, because of course, it will happen eventually. Don’t change anything. Just keep doing,” she said.

There are actually two books Olyslagers relies on. The other is the Bible.

She is an evangelist Christian of a denomination she prefers not to disclose. She runs her own ministry, Everlasting Crowns, which encourages and teaches athletes in religion.

She often writes a scripture verse on her arms when she competes and talks of feeling like she is being like she is lifted over the bar by her faith.

When she won her Olympic silver medal in Paris, she wrapped herself in a white flag and danced on the track with abandon.

“I was in church one day, just having a great time, and I got this picture of me dancing with this white banner,” she said in Paris.

“And I’m like, I don’t like dancing. I didn’t like doing a first dance with my husband on our wedding day. But I wanted people to see that joy, and that expression of praise, not because it looks pretty, but because He’s worthy of it. To be honest, I don’t really know why He asked me to do it, but I did it. In that moment, I got such a joy in my heart: I’m an Olympic silver medallist.”

On Sunday night she said that as she was waiting out there on the track to jump, she was at peace because she was there communing with Jesus.

A glimpse inside Olyslagers’ book during qualifying.

She stood at the top of her run-up before the full house crowd of 68,000 people in Tokyo’s national stadium and raised her arms in part to get the crowd clapping, but she would hold her arms out and look to the sky and mouth prayers. In a largely secular world, these are not regular routines.

Olyslagers found God as a 16-year-old on a youth camp. She has become devout since.

At that point, she was a gangly girl called Nicola McDermott from North Gosford on the New South Wales central coast. Her mum’s side of the family came from the stunningly beautiful small island of Korcula off the Croatian coast from Dubrovnik.

“My mother’s maiden name is Marinovic, both of her parents (my grandparents) were born and raised in Blato (Korcula) and moved to Sydney after WWII for the new opportunities Australia presented,” she told Croatia Weekly in 2020.

“My Baba helped raise me as a child, so every day we eat Croatian food, talk to our relatives on the phone and embraced the Croatian culture whilst living in Australia. I am very connected to my roots.”

Olyslagers was always tall for her age and a bit uncoordinated at sports, she said. Until she found high jump. She had tried shot put but suffice to say being tall and skinny– she is 186 centimetres and 68 kilos now – she was never going to be a shot putter.

She went to world juniors as a 17-year-old high jumper in 2014 but didn’t do much. When she went to the London world championships in 2017 she didn’t even clear a height.

Her breakout came in 2018 when she went to the Commonwealth Games and won bronze with a jump of 1.91 metres.

Three years later she became the first Australian woman to clear two metres, and later that year in the same stadium where she won her world title on Sunday night, albeit an empty stadium for the COVID-delayed games, Olyslagers won Olympic silver with a jump of 2.02 metres. She was still Nicola McDermott then. She only married Rhys Olyslagers in 2022 and changed her surname.

Olyslagers and her fellow medallists in Tokyo.

This was the start of a period of sharing the podium with Australia’s Eleanor Patterson and Ukrainian Yaroslava Mahuchikh.

Olyslagers again won Olympic silver at the Paris Olympics, set a new national record earlier this year when she cleared 2.04 metres, won the Diamond League, won bronze at the previous world championships in Budapest, gold at the past two world indoors, including in China earlier this year, and on Sunday won gold in Tokyo. She is never not on the podium. Patterson and Mahuchikh are invariably with her.

At the past four major championships – the Olympics in Paris and Tokyo and the world championships in Budapest and Oregon – 10 of the 12 available medals were won by just those three women.

Again on Sunday night, Mahuchikh was there on the podium, sharing a bronze. Patterson missed out this time, finishing fourth, as she struggled coming back from injury to be fully fit in time for the championships.

But again on Sunday it was Olyslagers, putting it in the book.