Canadian pole vault champ Alysha Newman has sets her sights on heptathlon. It’s her way to revive her joy for sport

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This article was published 12/05/2022 (1614 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LONDON, Ont.—Alysha Newman is throwing a javelin and it’s not exactly flying across the practice field at Western University.

But she is starting to get parts of the throwing movement, and her javelin coach tells her that’s success worth celebrating.

Newman is a two-time Olympian and the Canadian record-holder in pole vault. She’s used to launching herself as high as 4.82 metres in the air on the end of a skinny pole, not working through the aerodynamics involved in throwing a spear down the field. This javelin practice in early May is just her third one ever.

It’s part of an audacious plan: Is it possible that training for the seven throw, jump and run events in the heptathlon is the best way for Newman to regain her excellence and, even more importantly, her confidence in pole vault?

Even before her first heptathlon competition this weekend in Ottawa, there are promising signs that this unorthodox strategy just might be working. Since boosting her heptathlon training in recent weeks, Newman says she has had some of her best pole vault practices. That’s no small thing given the difficult stretch she has come through. In the lead-up to last summer’s Tokyo Olympics, Newman tried to push through what she now realizes were serious concussion-related effects.

It didn’t work. What she hoped would be her best Olympics turned out to be her worst. She failed to get over the bar in the qualifying round, ending her chance to compete for a medal. It was a crushing moment for Newman, who prides herself on living up to her social media tag line: “Raise the bar, wherever you go.”

After the Games, she started working with a doctor who told her to take six months off pole vault to let herself truly heal. But Newman knew if she left sport for that long she’d never come back.

“I’m a busybody,” the 27-year-old says. “I like to do more things than just track and field, whether that’s modelling, Instagram, acting. If I stepped away from track and field I would have retired, 110 per cent.”

And she didn’t want to do that, not with the way things ended in Tokyo.

So, last fall, she started hurdling to stay in shape and keep busy. In the winter, at a training camp in Florida, she started training with two of Canada’s multi-event Olympians, Georgia Ellenwood and Pierce LePage.

“This is way fun,” she recalls of those sessions. “And I was getting better every day because it was so new and so I was motivated. I would wake up before my alarm clock and I was ready to go. I was eating the right foods and I was happy to be out on the track. I wasn’t even thinking about the concussion anymore.”

Training a range of events from hurdles to shot put, and even the painful 800-metre race, revived her joy for sport that had been lost in all the pressure she put on herself to perform in pole vault last season while she struggled with lingering concussion-related problems. It also gave her some much needed perspective.

“Pole vault just feels like an eighth event, it doesn’t feel like my be-all end-all,” she says.

“I know I have seven other events in the next three days that I have to do so I can’t sit and dwell on pole vault. I forget about what happens instead of torturing myself.”

Her long-time pole vault coach, Doug Wood, agrees with her assessment.

“Where she is right now in her career, she doesn’t need to jump very much in practice. Technically, she’s as good as anybody and what’s holding her back has been her ability to tap into that on a regular basis,” Wood says.

“For her, it’s not about capabilities; it’s about finding a way to harvest the spectacular Alysha Newman that is in there.”

Now she trains pole vault in Toronto, where she lives, two days a week and goes to London, her hometown, to train three days a week with Vickie Croley —Western’s head track and field coach, who also helps coach Olympic champion decathlete Damian Warner — and throws coach Sylvia Kontra in javelin.

While training for heptathlon started as a recovery plan and an interesting way to get away from pole vault, it may turn into more than that for Newman, who likes to set big goals for herself, on and off the track.

Her main goal this year is still to qualify in pole vault for July’s world championships in Eugene, Ore., and the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. But, if heptathlon training goes well enough, she’s hoping for a shot to double in Birmingham and compete in the multi-event there as well.

“I have to have a goal in my mind,” she says, smiling. “Because no one’s going to want to train 800-metre workouts without a goal at the end. Those are pure pain.”

Kerry Gillespie is a Toronto-based sports reporter for the Star. Reach her via email: kgillespie@thestar.ca