Stefan Holm was inspired by the 1980 Moscow Olympics, which he watched on TV as a four-year-old in his native Sweden, to jump over the sofa. He broke his arm but was undeterred. When he was six, his father built a high-jump pit in their backyard out of pillows and an old mattress. He became obsessed with the sport. At 15, he won the Swedish youth championships.
But Holm was just 5’11″, not 6’7″, like his idol Patrik Sjöberg. To compensate, he developed a sprinting approach and started taking off from farther and farther away from the bar.
In 1998, he won the first of eleven consecutive Swedish national championships. He trained 12 sessions per week.
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.
In 2007 he entered the World Championships in Osaka, Japan, as the favorite, and was facing a competitor he barely knew, Donald Thomas, from the Bahamas. Thomas had just begun high jumping, in the U.S. A friend at college had dared him to high-jump a 6’6″ bar, and he did. Then he cleared 6’8″. Then he cleared 7 feet. So they told the track coach:
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.
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In his first full season, Thomas cleared 7’7.75″ to win the NCAA indoor high jump championship.
Thomas won the 2007 world championship.