Morgan Lake joins the 2 meter club

Morgan Lake joins the 2 meter club

The women’s high jump  at the 2025 Diamond League finals was an epic competition with Nicola Olysagers winning with 2.04m and four athletes clearing the magical 2 meter barrier. But what I want to write about is Morgan Lake getting two meters for the first time. I first recall seeing Morgan at the European  Champions in Zurich in 2014 and the European Indoors in Prague in 2015 when she was 17 and then at the World Championships in 2015.  At that stage she was not sure if she was a high jumper or a heptathlete. I first interviewed her in 2017. At that stage she was still torn, telling me: “I do want to have one last shot at the heptathlon.  It is something I have always loved doing but this year and last year I have had a lot of focus on high jump because of circumstances like injury and training structures and because it is my go to back-up event. I’ve been lucky that it has been going well and I am really enjoying it.  I will do another winter of heptathlon work and see where that takes me”.

Morgan jumped 1.90m in 2013 aged 16, then 1.94m (2014), 1.96m (2017), 1.97m (2018) 1.99m (2023). She was fourth in the Budapest Worlds with 1.97.m  I remember at the time being impressed with her resolve.  I am sure she could have cleared something higher but was determined to stay in the fight for a medal and risk all on a 2m jump. In terms of the process, Morgan also made an interesting point that many of the crowd are probably not track and field experts and they will look at her and think, she is amazing to be able to jump 2 metres, not realizing that it is the culmination of 12 years work from jumping 1.90 in 2013 to getting to 2m in 2025.

In Zurich, in the street event, where she finally nailed the magical 2 meters, she could hardly contain her excitement: “Amazing! Jumping 2 meters is really something I wanted to do in my whole career. I’m still kind of in shock today. In Lausanne last week I felt so good, but with the rain good jumps were not really possible. I knew a big one was there. So I wanted to jump again soon. After clearing 1.97 tonight, I was like ‘I know I have something big in me this evening’. When I cleared 2 meters I had to look at the board to double-check that I really did this. I jumped a national record today, at a Diamond League final and came…