Patterson back where she belongs

Four years ago Eleanor Patterson was the shooting star who fell to earth.

As she approaches the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham as the new world champion, she reflects on her most unlikely journey to the pinnacle of her sport.

Patterson emerged from the small town of Leongatha in rural Australia as a prodigious high jumping talent in her mid-teens and by 16 she was being touted as a future international star. At 17, she jumped 1.96m to equal the world U18 best, and she won her first senior international title at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow while she was still in high school.

It seemed only a matter of time before Patterson would stand atop the world as a senior athlete. But instead she foundered. Her natural shyness made the spotlight confronting and her coach was controlling. First she hit a plateau and then her performance began to slide and four years later she failed for the Australian team to qualify to defend her Commonwealth Games title on home soil in 2018.

She quit the sport, didn’t go near a track for a year, and it seemed that would be all she wrote in the annals of sport.

But that is the point at which her journey diverged from the well-worn path of other brilliant youngsters who could not make the jump to elite level.

The wise heads of Australian athletics knew that Patterson was a generational talent, one that they could not afford to lose. One of those was Alex Stewart, a Sydney high jump coach, who was desperate to keep Patterson in the sport.

When she retired, aged 21, Stewart kept in touch with Patterson, calling occasionally to see how she was, not putting any pressure on her, just making sure that if she decided to try again that she could see her way back and that there were people willing to help her.

For most of that time she believed she was finished as an athlete – a spark that burned bright briefly, but flamed out.

"I always knew from a young age that I could clear big heights and I believed that I could be a high performer,” she says. But when her performance level dropped away and she began to struggle with her original coach, she lost that faith.

The dream died "in a lot of ways because I didn’t set foot on a track for a year I didn't set foot in a gym for over a year. It was starting from scratch. I was sitting out on the couch and it was dead, gone. That was done.”

“It was not until the last couple of months before joining Alex that I was able to say 'I think I'm not done’.”

Stewart brought her back slowly but there were predictable setbacks after a year in which she says all her strength and fitness had been lost.

"It's not easy coming back, there was trial and error with my body, new training sessions, a new training programme, injuries, hardships,” said Patterson. “I was able to pull out some random performances but it hasn’t been until this year where it's been such a pivotal moment of consistency.”

She showed glimpses of her ability in 2020, hitting a personal best of 1.99m, and she reached the Olympic final in Tokyo last year, where she finished fifth as her Australian teammate and contemporary Nicola McDermott (now Olyslagers) soared to the silver medal.

But this year, it is Patterson who has thrived. She started brightly on the World Indoor Tour in February, winning three consecutive competitions, and carried that momentum to the World Indoor Championships in Belgrade in March, where she duelled with Ukrainian Yaroslava Mahuchikh, another former teenage prodigy, for the gold medal.

Mahuchikh, fuelled by her desire to give hope and inspiration to her embattled country, dug deeply to claim the victory, but Patterson cleared the two-metre barrier for the first time and earned something just as valuable to her, the confidence that she could win at world level.

Then came the World Championships in Oregon.

In many ways the trajectory of Patterson’s performance at Hayward Field in Eugene followed that of her career – promising start, troubled mid-section, triumphant finish.

She cleared the first four heights cleanly, but almost came unstuck at 1.98m where she needed three attempts to stay in the competition. At 2.00m, with four women left in the competition, she needed two attempts to progress.

But at 2.02m she made the defining jump of the final, soaring over the personal best height on her first attempt to take the lead, equalling the Oceanian record in the process. Mahuchikh needed two tries, which meant that Patterson could only be beaten if the young Ukrainian conquered 2.04m. Either way, they would take the top two steps on the podium.

In her mind, Patterson was thinking that 2.04m would be required to claim the gold, but neither athlete could beat the bar, and the Australian claimed the gold medal on countback.

"There were a number of moments where I had to dig deep to remain alive and secure a medal and then see if I could stay at the top of the podium,” she said afterwards.

“There were only a few minutes between 2.00m and 2.02m and I knew I had to replicate that exact same jump. I knew I could clear that height and to do that on the first attempt was amazing. I'm overjoyed I could even clear that height, I knew it was within me, but to bring it out under such pressure, I'm just so proud of myself."

She warned that so far she had shown only “a skerrick” of her ability.

Now Patterson turns her attention to the competition where it all began for her, the Commonwealth Games, in Birmingham this week. Eight years after that initial splash, she will arrive at the Games having conquered the world.

“It's wild in so many ways,” she said. “Given that the 2014 Commonwealth Games was my first international team and a breakthrough in so many ways. Then to miss out on the team in 2018 was the catalyst for stepping away from the sport.

“To now come full circle and to have had that four-year cycle of I'm here again and I'm in the best shape of my life. I'm overjoyed that I can come back to a Commonwealth Games. Now I'm a 26-year-old, I'm an adult and I'm completely different.”

In astronomy, a falling star can’t rise again. In athletics, she can.

Nicole Jeffery for World Athletics