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.