Express Exclusive: How Olympic high jump champ Mutaz Essa Barshim takes off like an aeroplane | Asian-games News

The art, Mutaz Essa Barshim, is waxing lyrical about his art, high jump.“A great art knows how to really craft the colors,” says the Qatari, “absorb the picture he’s looking at or has in his mind to put it down on a canvas. He knows precisely the right amount of everything needed to create that final beauty of a product. For me, that’s similar to high jump.”
Barshim’s canvas is a cushioned, square pit straddled poles with a horizontal bar balancing on it. His art is defying gravity. And few are better than him.
The joint Olympic champion is the second-best human being in his craft. Strictly going records, the three-time world champion who won the bronze at the most-recent edition in Budapest is also the best of this generation.

Barshim’s personal best jump of 2.43m is just 2 cm short of Cuban Javier Sotomayor’s long-standing world record standing for 30 years since 1993. Only 11 people have leaped over 2.40m in the hory of high jump. Mind numbingly, Barshim alone has done it the same number of times.
“You know, we talk about this like normal, but the level that we jump is not normal. If you look at the people that actually jump 2.40-plus several times, I think it’s only me and Soto. And how many billion people live on this earth?” he asks, rhetorically.
“I don’t think about it often but sometimes you need to think about it, appreciate yourself. I need to take a moment and give myself some appreciation because even if you come to my house, you’re not going to find any of my medals or trophies because I always feel like I don’t want to be satisfied.”

The author David Winner once quoted Alan Shearer, in reference to Wayne Rooney in a decade-old piece for ESPN, as saying that great athletes can do everything. But they cannot explain their art.
Barshim, then, is an exception that proves the rule. Before leaving for Hangzhou, where he has set sights on reclaiming the Asian Games gold that he couldn’t defend in 2018 due to an injury, the Qatari high jumper spoke to The Indian Express, breaking down his skill with the same elegance and precision as his Fosbury Flop.
‘Like an airplane’
From start to finish, the entire process of a jump, Barshim says, lasts not more than 45 seconds.
It starts with a deep breath and a ‘tunnel vision’ from the start of his run-up. His first few steps are small, almost gingerly. Barshim calls it ‘dribbling’.
“When I’m dribbling, I’m starting to find the right moment to actually start accelerating. It’s almost like an airplane, you know, trying to find that good rhythm before you are ready to take off,” he says.
Within these 45, all the complications and contradictions that define a good jump surface.
“We need speed, but too much speed is a problem; it’s gonna prevent you from jumping high. But too less speed and you are not going to clear the bar. So you need to be precise on how and where to put the speed.
“And then you need flexibility, but not too much because then you will lose strength. But of course, you need to be strong, you need to have strength and physique (to pull the body over the bar). But you can’t have a lot of muscle as well because if you go to the gym and start lifting, you’re gonna gain weight, which is another problem for high jumpers, you cannot lose weight.”

In his first six-seven steps, Barshim gets into his rhythm and the correct pace. Roughly around the eighth step onwards, he says his strides get longer and the knee higher. the time he approaches the bar, his body is straight and at an angle.
Downward force ‘30 times your body weight’
To get his body to leap over the bar, Barshim says he generates a downward force that is ‘more like 30 times your body weight’ slightly bending his knee. But the bend, unlike most jumpers, isn’t pronounced.
“It’s the right technique, understanding what’s right. Let’s say, the mind of a simple human will be like, ‘the lower I go, the higher I jump’. In theory, it works. But it’s wrong. That’s not how it works.
“When I come to the bar, and my body is already 20 cm lower, that means I am starting lower. So I’m always trying to make sure that at the takeoff moment, my body is just as straight as it could be.”
Just before he takes off, Barshim’s shoulders rise and it’s only at that point that he begins to bend his knee to avoid contact with the bar. And when he takes flight, Barshim’s elastic body curls over the bar, his head stretched backwards and once his upper body clears it, he tucks in his chin and raises his legs upwards mid-air.
“It’s all the result of repetition. As I said, it’s like a craft. It takes a long time (to perfect) but the final product is going to be something that’s particularly amazing and high quality. I have been doing this for many years, that’s the key,” he says.
The repetition isn’t the jumps, but the work in the gym and recovery. Barshim says he trains six days a week – Friday is his day off – but he jumps just once a week. “When I was young, I jumped twice or thrice a week. And in the past two years, it’s probably sometimes been even once every 10 days,” he says.
‘Going to hell and back’
For someone who has been jumping for close to two decades, it’s easy to forget that Barshim is still in the prime of his youth.
Barshim was just out of his teens when he came close to breaking Sotomayer’s world record of 2.45m with a massive jump of 2.43m.
From the outside, the gap might not be too much to cover. But add the adjective ‘only’ to the 2cm, and Barshim’s smirk is apparent even on a phone call.
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“Two centimeters… Each centimeter is like going to hell and back, training wise, dedication wise, everything,” he says.
He’ll embark on another trip to ‘hell’ next week, when he takes another shot at the world record and also chases his third Asian Games title. He is the outright favourite to win the gold in Hangzhou. And he isn’t modest about it.
“I won (the gold) two times, in 2010 and then in 2014. A month before the 2018 Games I hurt my foot and was in surgery so I couldn’t repeat. Now, I’m hoping to come back and have my third title.”