The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (4 page)

In 1987, as if sent by the jumping gods to aid Stefan Holm in his quest, a professional-grade indoor track-and-field facility called Våxnäshallen opened in western Sweden, just a few minutes’ drive from his tiny hometown of Forshaga. It gave Holm, at the age of eleven, what would become his year-round, career-long, world-class training venue.

At fourteen, Holm cleared six feet, an age-group record in his area in the west of Sweden, though he was defeated at a handful of competitions that season. At fifteen, he won the Swedish youth championships and traveled with his father to Gothenburg to meet Patrik Sjöberg’s coach, Viljo Nousiainen. The meeting sparked an enduring friendship between the elder Holm and Nousiainen, and Johnny Holm began to adapt some of Nousiainen’s training methods for his teenage son. The boy who had idolized the great Patrik Sjöberg was suddenly being groomed to become him. But there was an obvious difference. Sjöberg was 6'7", while every local newspaper article about Holm’s accomplishments noted his diminutive stature. As an adult, Holm would top out at 5'11", downright Lilliputian for a high jumper. In a sport that requires raising one’s center of mass as high as possible, starting with a high center of mass is an enormous advantage.

As a teenager, Holm developed the high jumper’s equivalent of stage fright: when the bar was raised to a height above his head, he would take his normal approach, but rather than jumping he simply ran under the bar and onto the landing mat. In several competitions in his teens, Holm did that three straight times at a given height, which meant he was out of the competition. Instead of giving up, Holm redoubled his work, quitting soccer and dedicating himself solely to high jump. At sixteen, he lost only a single competition—a wound he would remember and avenge with his undefeated 2004 season—and immersed himself in what he later called a “twenty-year love affair with the high jump.” (For much of those two decades, it was an exclusive love affair that left Holm little time for girlfriends.) As Holm himself acknowledges, it would be a fair bet that he has taken more high jumps than any human being who has ever lived.

By seventeen, Holm was good enough to face his hero Sjöberg in competition. Sjöberg won handily, but Holm wondered whether he could one day top the Swedish icon if he kept at it. At nineteen, Holm started a weight-lifting regimen—concentrated on his left leg, of course—that would get progressively more intense over a decade to the point where he could put 310 pounds, double his weight, on his shoulders and squat so low that his butt nearly grazed the ground, before popping back up.

To compensate for his stature, Holm perfected a sprinting approach where he hit a top speed around nineteen miles per hour, likely faster than any other jumper in the world. To accommodate that speed, he had to start taking off from farther and farther away from the bar. Holm was flying faster, farther, and higher every year, rocketing at the bar and curling his body around it so tightly that if his heels had a secret they could whisper it into his ear when he was in full arch. Starting in 1987, Holm improved a few centimeters every year, without fail. In a task that seems so “you either got it, or you don’t,” Holm was transforming himself into the ultimate “got it.”

In 1998, Holm won the first of eleven consecutive Swedish national championships. Three years later, he finished just off the Olympic medal stand, taking fourth in Sydney. That was not good enough.

Holm had been living at home and taking college classes on and off. At twenty-five, he dropped out of school and moved out of his parents’ house into an apartment that was just down the road from the Våxnäshallen facility, in Karlstad, a town of sixty thousand that sits on the north coast of the largest lake in Sweden. From then on, Holm trained twelve sessions per week. His workday started at ten
A.M
. with two hours of weights, box jumps, or hurdles—he and his father designed hurdles that could be raised to five and a half feet. Then a break for lunch, and another session in the late afternoon that might consist of thirty high jumps at full competition speed. Thirty, that is, if all went according to plan. Holm could not go home on a miss, nor would he lower the bar to facilitate a clearance, so practice went until he made it over whatever height he was confronting. By the time Athens rolled around, Johnny Holm had watched his son take so many jumps that he could tell whether Stefan would clear the bar when he was still four steps from liftoff.

Without a running start, Holm’s standing vertical jump hovered around twenty-eight inches, which is perfectly pedestrian for an athlete. But his blazing fast approach allowed him to slam down on his Achilles tendon, which would then act like a rebounding spring to propel him over the bar. When scientists examined Holm, they determined that his left Achilles tendon had hardened so much from his workout regimen that a force of 1.8 tons was needed to stretch it a single centimeter, about four times the stiffness of an average man’s Achilles, making it an unusually powerful launching mechanism.

In 2005, a year after he won the Olympic title, Holm earned a qualification of the perfect human projectile: he cleared 7'10.5", equaling the record for the highest high-jump differential between the bar and the jumper’s own height.

•

Late in the day that I met him at the snow-covered train station in Karlstad, Holm took me to Våxnäshallen, the facility that “was my home for twenty years,” he said. On one side of the track, near a weight-lifting
area, is a locked box that contains Holm’s custom-made hurdles. To save himself from himself, Holm has given away the key. He still visits to high jump once or twice a week, though, and his father trains young jumpers at the facility.

Holm’s son Melwin has begun to tag along. (Melwin is not a Swedish name. Holm and his wife liked “Melvin,” and Holm wanted “win” somewhere in the boy’s name.) One day in 2007, when Melwin was two and Johnny Holm was babysitting, Stefan returned home and found his infant son flopping backward in diapers over a high jump constructed of Lego Duplo bricks. “He cleared thirty centimeters,” Holm says, with a straight face.

At Våxnäshallen, a few kids approach Holm for autographs. (Since his athletic retirement, Holm has become famous for winning Swedish television quiz shows. He has a steel trap of a memory and can recall exact heights from competition jumps twenty years in the past.) For the most part, Holm is left alone to watch a group of seven- and eight-year-old children try high jumping. Some of the kids jump off the wrong foot. Others go off both feet. As the children flop onto the mat one by one, Holm points to those who have a feel for how their body should move in the air. Holm whispers to me, noting the children who he thinks have potential. When I ask whether he could teach any one of them to be an Olympic champion, he says: “There are some things you can’t teach, the sort of feel for jumping. I was never into training the technical things. The [back] arch was just always there.”

As we leave the facility and make our way back toward the train station, we pass a bookstore. “Come here,” Holm beckons, pointing through the window of the store at a white book bearing a hand that is painted blue and making a victory sign. As I press my face to the glass, I see that it’s the Swedish translation of Malcolm Gladwell’s
Outliers
.

“You see this? Read this,” Holm says. “There were jumpers who beat me when I was young. You wouldn’t have said I would be Olympic champion. It’s all about your ten thousand hours.”

•

In 2007, Holm entered the World Championships in Osaka, Japan, as the favorite. And, despite the fact that there has never been a more assiduous student of high jump, Holm was faced with a competitor who he barely knew: Donald Thomas, a jumper from the Bahamas. Thomas had just begun high jumping. As Thomas’s cousin, a college track coach, put it, “He still doesn’t know that a track goes around in a circle.”

The previous year, on January 19, 2006, Thomas was sitting in the cafeteria at Lindenwood University in Saint Charles, Missouri, boasting about his slam-dunking prowess with a few guys from the track team. Carlos Mattis, Lindenwood’s top high jumper, had enough of Thomas’s lip and bet him that he could not clear 6'6" in a high jump competition.

Thomas decided to put his hops where his mouth was. He went home and grabbed a pair of sneakers and returned to the Lindenwood field house where a smirking Mattis had already set the bar at 6'6". Mattis stepped back and waited for the big talker to fall to earth. And Thomas did, but the bar did not come with him. To Mattis’s amazement, Thomas cleared it easily. So Mattis pushed the bar up to 6'8". Thomas cleared it. Seven feet. Without a semblance of graceful high-jump technique—Thomas hardly arched his back and his legs flailed in the air like the streamers trailing a kite—he cleared it.

Mattis rushed Thomas over to the office where head track coach Lane Lohr was organizing his roster for the upcoming Eastern Illinois University Mega Meet and told the coach that he had a seven-foot high jumper. “The coach said there’s no way I could do that. He didn’t believe it,” Thomas recalls. “But Carlos was like, ‘Yeah, he really did it.’ So he asked if I wanted to go to a track meet on Saturday.” Lohr picked up the phone and pleaded with the meet organizer to permit a late entry.

Two days later, in a black tank top and white Nike sneakers and shorts so baggy they blanketed the bar as he passed over it, Thomas cleared 6'8.25" on his first attempt, qualifying for the national championships.
Then he cleared 7'0.25" for a new Lindenwood University record. And then, on the seventh high jump attempt of his life, with rigid form akin to a man riding an invisible deck chair backward through the air, Thomas cleared 7'3.25", a Lantz Indoor Fieldhouse record. That’s when Coach Lohr forced him to stop out of concern that he might hurt himself.

It would get better. Two months later, Thomas competed at the Commonwealth Games in Australia against some of the best professional jumpers in the world, wearing tennis shoes. He placed fourth in a world-class field, a result that actually confused him because he did not yet understand how tiebreakers work in high jump and thought that he was in third place until the results were announced.

Thomas’s cousin Henry Rolle was the hurdles coach at Auburn University, and Thomas was swiftly offered a scholarship to Auburn on the condition that he agree to commit to actually start training for the high jump in 2007. So he did. Sort of.

Auburn assistant coach Jerry Clayton had coached Charles Austin, the 1996 Olympic high jump champion, and saw right away that he needed to develop Thomas slowly. “When he first got here, he didn’t know how to warm up or stretch,” Clayton said. And then there was the issue of practice. Thomas would step out of practice at Auburn’s Beard-Eaves-Memorial Coliseum under the guise of going for a drink of water, and forty minutes later Clayton would find him outside shooting baskets. In Thomas’s own words, he found high jump “kind of boring.”

With a few months of light training, Clayton lessened Thomas’s stutter-step, and though he couldn’t get Thomas to put on the high jump shoes that every other elite competitor wears, he at least got him into pole vault shoes. In his first full season, Thomas cleared 7'7.75" to win the NCAA indoor high jump championship.

In August 2007, with a total of eight months of legitimate high-jump training to his name, Thomas donned his pole vault shoes and the gold and aquamarine uniform of his native Bahamas and traveled to Osaka,
Japan, for the World Championships. In non-Olympic years, the World Championships are the Super Bowl of track and field.

Thomas advanced easily to the final, as did Stefan Holm. When the men’s high jump finalists were introduced, broadcasters announced a laser-focused Holm as the favorite. Thomas, looking cool in sunglasses beneath the bright lights illuminating the stadium, was described as “very much an unknown quantity.”

Early in the competition, it appeared that Thomas would fold in his first world spotlight. While the rest of the jumpers took such lengthy approaches that they had to start on the running track, Thomas began on the infield, as if he were using the high jump equivalent of the short tees at a golf course. He stutter-stepped his way to a miss at 7'3"—each jumper gets three attempts at every height—lower than he jumped in that first meet at Eastern Illinois. Meanwhile, Holm was cruising, passing over 7'3", 7'5", 7'6.5", and 7'7.73" without a single miss, as his father watched through a video camera and pumped his fist in the stands.

But Thomas began to hit his form, managing to alternate makes and misses. He arrived at 7'8.5" along with a handful of other jumpers, including Holm.

For his first attempt, Holm stood with his eyes closed, envisioning himself floating over the bar. He approached, leapt, and barely grazed the bar. As it fell to the ground, he executed a frustrated backflip on the mat. Next, Yaroslav Rybakov, a 6'6" Russian, nudged the bar off the stand. Then came Thomas. He slowed down so drastically as he approached the bar that it seemed impossible that he could clear it. And yet, flailing his legs and with his back nearly straight, he passed 7'8.5" on his first attempt, putting his hand down behind him as if to break his fall because he was still uncomfortable with the sensation of falling backward. He rolled off the mat and gamboled across the track in celebration. But Holm was up again.

Another miss, just barely. Holm shook his palms in front of him as if beseeching the high jump gods. They didn’t listen. On his final
attempt, Holm clipped the bar with the back of his legs and fell to the mat with his head in his palms.

The guy in pole vault shoes who thinks high jump is “kind of boring” was crowned the 2007 world champion. On his winning jump, Thomas had raised his center of mass to 8'2". Had he any semblance of the back arch that every other pro jumper does, he would have shattered the world record.

Holm was polite in his remarks afterward, congratulating the new champion. Rybakov called Thomas’s feat amazing, and noted that he himself had been practicing for an outdoor track-and-field world title for eighteen years and had yet to win one, compared with Thomas’s eight months. But Johnny Holm, Stefan’s coach and father, was so unnerved by Thomas’s win that in a postevent interview he called him a “
jävla pajas
,” literally “damn clown,” essentially the Swedish equivalent of “buffoon.” Johnny Holm said that Thomas’s “flutter kick style” was a scandal for high jump, and suggested that the inelegance of his jumping was an affront to the sport and the men who had spent years training.