(Repeats story filed earlier, no changes to text)
By Ian Ransom
MELBOURNE, May 15 (Reuters) – Hitting rock bottom six months
before the London Games was the best thing that could have
happened to Steve Hooker, the Olympic pole vault champion said,
after climbing out of an abyss of self-doubt to qualify last
week.
The 29-year-old jets off to Shanghai on Tuesday for the
weekend’s Diamond League meeting, having only just booked his
ticket to London with a vault of 5.72 metres at a sanctioned
event in Perth on Friday.
The party-like atmosphere of thumping electronic music,
spotlights and an exclusive guest-list at a disused railway
carriage depot was at odds with the enormous pressure Hooker
felt as he stared down the runway hoping the painstaking work he
had to done to rebuild his shattered confidence would pay off.
“I think for two years, even three years I was in a position
where I had momentum, but the momentum was going in the wrong
direction and it’s so hard to turn around,” the shaggy-haired
redhead said in a conference call from Perth.
“I think in a lot of ways hitting rock bottom had to happen
at some point for me to have that point where the only was up
and now I feel like I’m on that trajectory and I’m happy that I
feel like I can keep building on the things that I’ve been
working on.”
Hooker jumped 5.90m at the Beijing Games to become
Australia’s first man to win Olympic athletics gold in 40 years
and has a personal best of 6.06m set indoors, only bettered by
retired Ukrainian great Sergey Bubka.
Hooker’s dominance extended to winning the 2009 world
championship and the indoor title in 2010, but injury problems
saw him crash out of his rushed world title defence at Daegu
last year when he failed to clear 5.50m and make the final.
Battling to recover from a knee injury and with his
confidence shot to pieces, Hooker scrapped his domestic schedule
earlier this year to face up to his demons in private and
devoted himself to training at the depot in an obscure eastern
suburb of Perth.
Rebuilding his run-up and jump had been like a golfer trying
to get over a case of yips on the greens.
“To compare with golfing, it’s like rebuilding a putt, you
just sink a million one-foot putts and then move back to
two-foot and three-foot and four-putt putts,” he said.
“It was very gradual. It was just really everyday, small
improvements from one session to the next. That’s all I wanted
out of every session, a tiny step forward.
“Once I started getting into it, the first two to three
weeks were really hard, at the end of my third week I jumped a
personal best in two steps.
“When that happened I thought, well, if this continues I
will be fine. And that’s what I kept putting my confidence in.”
FEELING INVINCIBLE
Far from being a lightning bolt of confidence ahead of the
international season, Hooker downplayed his Perth jump as a
relief, and now feels some apprehension as he prepares to battle
other vaulters in Shanghai.
“That comp is going to be a real learning process, I’m not
expecting anything huge there. I want to go there and just get
back into the swing of international competition and get used to
jumping with other guys,” he said.
“I want to feel again like I felt in previous years where
I’m walking out on the competition area and I feel I can be the
best guy on the day.
“In 2009, I didn’t just feel good, I felt invincible, but
that was the culmination of four years, not four months.”
Hooker, who plans a crammed schedule of seven events before
London, believes it will take at least a 5.90m jump to be a
contender at the Games and is cautiously optimistic he can find
the extra 20 centimetres.
“If things keep going the way I’m going, 5.90 is not out of
the question. I’m really happy with my jump, what I’m doing off
the ground is amazing but the variable still is my run-up,” he
said. “I’ve just got to keep focusing on that … to slowly
catch up to where my jump is.
“I know that with what I’m doing, I’ve got the potential to
put up a big jump. And I know the Olympics is the sort of
occasion that’s going to bring the best out of me if I do
everything right over the next couple of months.”
(Editing by Peter Rutherford)
