Nicola McDermott won Olympic silver. Her training partner saved his daughter’s life

‘You’re going to make friends. You’re good at high jump. You’re smart. You’ll earn the respect of them.’

So she told herself, age 11. She was called cruel names and excluded at her last school. A fresh start was needed by Year 6.

Though she counted on being a state high jump champion for social currency, that idea went out the window at Green Point Christian College.

Her first thought: What are these people on?

“I had that ideology going into it, you have to perform in order for people to like you. I had those masks ready and then when I walked into the school, not only the teachers but the students, they just loved me,” says McDermott, now 26 and an Olympic silver medallist.

“They didn’t treat me like I was any different and it made me so curious. They said, ‘We love because Jesus loves us’.”

Faith and athletics have been the pillars of McDermott’s life. The same year, she began training with coach Matt Horsnell and fellow high jumper Chris Dodd.

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McDermott, fully grown at 186cm by age 14, was made for high jump. Where the bullies saw a target, Horsnell saw potential, despite the imperfections.

“She was pretty unco,” Horsnell says. He told Dodd as much before McDermott’s first squad session, with a tantalising kicker: if her training worked out, she could be very good.

Dodd, six years senior, was a star junior rugby league player turned aspiring Olympian. He hit the gym at 5am and led afternoon training sessions, on the NSW Central Coast. McDermott was a keen understudy.

“Chris was a really great role model for our squad,” she says. “He just had all the characteristics and mindsets of an athlete. There was a bit of an age gap, so I was always like the kid of the squad, but I definitely saw his potential.”

Horsnell recalls: “He used to mentor her and help her, just be a good motivational person. He was very similar to Nicola, virtually never missed a session. They would do them together and push each other. He’d be always, ‘Come on, Nicola, you’ve got to do better than that!’”

She became a genuine training peer for Dodd, who by 2015 boasted a PB of 2.23. They thought that they might reach the 2018 Comm Games together. The men’s qualifying height for the Rio 2016 Olympics was 2.29, within Dodd’s reach.

Yet Chris Dodd never became an Olympian.

On October 9, 2015, Dodd arrived back at his home in Springfield, NSW, with his family. He had just picked up his wife, Kellie, from work and their silver Honda CRV was parked nose-in on an inclined driveway. He unbuckled his daughter Ella, four, as Kellie attended to Ava, two.

He was unlocking the front door with Ella beside him when Kellie screamed for help. The handbrake had failed and the car was rolling. Dodd ran back to help. So did Ella.

As the car gathered speed, Ella ran into its path. Dodd had to save her.

He grabbed Ella but didn’t want to hurt her by throwing her out of the way, so instead held her with outstretched arms. The car smashed into the right side of his body and ran him over.

In an instant, the Olympics were gone.

The right leg from which he high jumped was fractured near the hip. He had right-side pelvic fractures, front and back, two fractured vertebrae and a torn right gluteus muscle.

Dodd was trapped under the car for about an hour, his head between the front and rear wheel. The car would have killed him had it not crashed into the house and stopped.

“I was conscious through it … so I still remember the feeling of the car running over me, I remember the feeling of my back breaking, the moments after where I realised, ‘I’m in real trouble here’,” he says.

“The first thing I did in the five seconds of silence that happened after the accident was I tried to move my toes and I thought, ‘All right, I’m not paralysed’. Everything after that I was like, ‘I’m OK, because I can move my legs, which means I can play with my kids’. That was all I needed at that point.

“Flying in the helicopter down to Royal North Shore, I remember thinking, ‘If I can’t do high jump anymore, I’m OK with that because I can still walk’. That was my mentality and as hard as it was going through all that, all the rehab and everything, I was OK with it because I knew that I’d be able to come out the other side.”

Ella escaped with bruising to her head, neck and foot. She spent a night in hospital before being discharged.

“His daughter said, ‘Daddy tackled the car!’” Horsnell recalls.

McDermott was still just 18, studying biochemistry at Sydney University and training when she could. She thinks Horsnell told her about Dodd’s accident; that time was a blur.

“It hits different when you know the person,” she says. “He’s one of the bravest people I know. He chose his family. I think he saved her life.

“I remember the outpouring of people helping out; even Mutaz Barshim (Qatar’s current Olympic and world high jump champion) sent him a video. I remember the first time I saw him after … I think it was just shock, the impact that it had. But he was still so humble and so diligent, even with his physio exercises and things. Matt would talk about him every day at training, so I had that connection.”

Ella is now 10, Ava is eight and they have another little sister, Mila, four. Dodd is alive and well; not an Olympian but a hero. He still counts his blessings rather than his losses.

What of faith, when something so terrible happens?

“I was freshly out of high school. I think a lot of things that happened in those years, just trust in God and pray for them,” McDermott says.

“When things like that catch me off guard, or just seem downright unfair, I’ve learned that rather than running away from God – ‘Why did you do this?’ – I’ve been running to God; I need help through this. I don’t know why a lot of things happen but sometimes I don’t need to understand, I just need to trust. For me, when things happen and people that I love get really affected and hurt, I go to God’s love in that time rather than demand answers. I just ask for understanding.

“That’s something that I learnt for that season of my life: I didn’t have all the answers but I wasn’t expected to. I just had to trust that He had answers.”

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The following year was the only one in which McDermott failed to improve her PB: 2016, when she remained stuck at 1.88. Barring that, her progression has been textbook.

On paper, that is. The reality was more complicated.

She had just one week to prepare for a late call-up to the 2017 world championships, at London’s Olympic stadium. Already beset with conflicting emotions about athletics, she no-heighted.

“I was devastated. I thought, ‘This could be the turning point where she could give up’,” Horsnell says.

“But I watched her … she didn’t bat an eyelid, cameras are in her face and she said, ‘I’m not letting those cameras see me cry’. She sat there and took the competition in, had a smile on her face. Sat there for the whole comp. Usually the athletes pack up and leave when they go out but she stayed there right to the end. For me, that moment was an inkling where I saw the true mental strength that she had within her.”

McDermott was strong, but did come very close to quitting during that plateau. An Olympic dream was no longer enough. Her pursuit of it felt wrong.

“I recognised that sport was the biggest thing in my life and faith wasn’t,” she says. “It wasn’t a main focus and I wasn’t satisfied. I found I was more satisfied when I was in church than I was on the podium. There was a very, very big moment where I was like, ‘No, I’m flicking the switch and I’m just going to pursue faith’. That became my No.1 and sport became No.2, No.3, whatever, when it came to my direction of where I wanted to be in life.

“I had come to the point where I was willing to leave sport completely, if I really felt that God was calling me to a different area. I’d come to that conclusion that that’s where I want to be, I would prefer to be where I really believed God wanted me to be, rather than force my way into my own dreams for my life.

“That eight-year-old’s dream that I had of being a 2m jumper, an Olympian … I realised that dream was based on my self-worth; why am I so tall and how do I get people to like me? The dream I had as a kid, even though it sounds amazing, I recognise that it wasn’t with good intentions, it was all about trying to find something that I’d already been given. I was loved, I was accepted, I had a purpose greater than any performance.

“So when I recognised that, I was like, ‘Wait a minute, why am I doing sport?’ Then I started thinking, ‘Well, if I’m going to do it, I want to do it the right way’. It was a real joy. I found this new motivation to train harder because it wasn’t my ‘why’, it wasn’t my everything. Then my performances now, jumping 14cm higher within four years, it’s crazy.”

McDermott launched an athlete-driven online ministry, Everlasting Crowns, in 2017 with best friend and long jumper Naa Anang. McDermott took refuge in the bible during her conflict with sport and found the scripture that has inspired her high jumping ever since.

1 John 4:18 – There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear.

“When I realised that I was loved perfectly from God … I realised he loves me too much for me to be attached to fear,” she says.

“I was fearful of rejection, when it came to people or friends growing up. Fear of heights, I don’t really like heights even though I’m a high jumper. Lots of different fears. I found that because I was loved, I was liberated from them, I could just let them go. Most people would be curious as to how you can let something go, but when you’re loved that much, it just sort of falls off you.”

McDermott won a bronze medal at the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games, jumping 1.91. She jumped 2.00 to break the Australian record in April last year, then 2.01 at Stockholm’s Diamond League meet in July. She had first asked what the Australian record was at age eight, after jumping for the second time.

While McDermott was a surprise to most of Australia during her first Olympics, she was always a big chance to medal.

“You get goosebumps even just thinking back about it,” Dodd says. “It was surreal leading up to the Olympics because talking with athletics mates and old training partners, I remember saying to them, ‘I’m pretty certain Nicola’s going to win a medal’. When you looked at her results leading into the Olympics, you take emotion out of it and you’re saying, ‘She’s definitely going to go really well, if not take out gold’.”

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McDermott’s Tokyo campaign was almost flawless, a triumph of the mind and soul.

“The Olympic Games, I’m watching her walk around, warming up … she looked like she belonged there, like she was in her living room,” Horsnell recalls.

“Sometimes when you see an athlete warming up at a big competition like that, it can almost be like the warm-up is a mini competition. I’ve seen athletes do too many jumps in the warm-up because they’re trying to over-impress the other athletes. She just did exactly the amount of jumps she needed to warm up, did exactly what she needed to do, didn’t worry about anyone else. That’s a brilliant place to be in your headspace when you’ve never been in an Olympic Games before. She just did that naturally.”

Way back at the 2014 junior world championships, Horsnell told her to stop watching the other athletes jump. McDermott was too switched on for her own good; she would over-analyse and burn mental energy.

Writing a diary between jumps was a sports psychologist’s extension of the strategy. She began to rate every aspect of her jump and score it out of 10. The system was introduced for the 2019 world championships and became famous at the Olympics.

“Even in the athletics world, everyone knows me as the girl who writes in the notebook. Everyone. World record holders and stuff, they come up to me like, ‘You’re the notebook girl!’” says McDermott, who at age eight wrote a poem about going to the Games.

Her entire routine captivated Australia. She flashed a beaming smile at the top of her run-up while yelling to herself, ‘C’mon!’, another sports psych initiative; ‘The loudest voice in your head is the one that your brain listens to’. She looked up at the bar; ‘God’s with me, I’ll be OK’. She clapped her hands overhead, both for rhythm and to involve the crowd. Slapped her legs. Yelled another ‘C’mon’. Ran in and crossed her fingers reflexively while soaring over the bar. Cleared 2.02, another PB. Wrote it down: 10/10.

She trailed only Russian Olympic Committee’s Mariya Lasitskene (2.04) and had won the silver medal.

Dodd was watching on back home in Australia. He was elated … and envious. How could he not be?

Dodd went more than a year with no physical exercise, barring rehab, after his accident. He felt like his body aged a decade overnight and developed a degenerative disc condition that at times caused “horrendous back pain”. Playing recreational sport was a key achievement. He went to the Rio Olympics as a spectator and had a wonderful time, yet also badly cut his foot on a rock at the iconic Copacabana Beach.

“Watching Nicola jump at the Olympics … It‘s something that every athlete wants to achieve, to go to the Olympics. I wouldn’t say that there wasn’t a pang of jealousy there, and envy,” the high school PE teacher says.

“But I was just so happy for her and I’m so happy for Matt, because I know all the work that they’ve done to get to that point and I know how much this means, to be at that level. I was just so happy for them.

“She’s a perfect combination, Matt identified it in the very first training session when he said, ‘I think this girl’s got the ability to be very, very good’. He knew that just from a physiological perspective, because she had the perfect build, but I don’t think he really realised at that point how mentally strong she was and how capable she was of handling the pressure that comes with being an elite athlete. I think it’s been a surprise for everyone to see how she’s progressed but when you know Nicola, and you know what she’s like, then it’s not a surprise at all.”

While not an Olympian, Dodd won at life. He still counts himself lucky.

“He has a great family,” McDermott says. “He was so supportive. He said all of his students were all supporting me too back on the Central Coast. That was really nice.”

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Instantly famous, McDermott had a message of faith to share with the nation watching live on TV. One that she’d been warned against.

“I was expecting a lot of backlash for it. And people even said, ‘If you even mention in your acceptance speech about your faith, they will stop the cameras rolling. They’re going to just plaster your image all over the newspapers with these really negative things’,” she recalls.

“But then as I was walking and I had my silver medal around my neck and I saw the interviewer there with the microphone and the TV, I didn’t see the platform that I was potentially losing if I shared my faith, I just saw the person that was interviewing me. And I thought, ‘Even if he edits it or stops the cameras rolling, he’s going to hear something authentic from me’. My heart is for the one, so even if no one else in Australia hears it, he heard it and that’s important to me.

“And then I got asked about faith afterwards and I almost fell off the chair; I wasn’t sitting on a chair but I was like, ‘Wow … I didn’t really prepare for this!’ I think I’m just trying to be as genuine as possible and not preconceive what people are going to think or ask. Just share it and if people want it, it’s there, and if people don’t, I’ll just appreciate that and move on. I think every athlete, you have a message and you have a platform. Most athletes might use that platform however they want to but for me, that’s the glory of the platform. I really want to use it for this message.”

McDermott will remain well in the public eye; she has four major meets this year. The World Indoor Championships, Belgrade in March. The World Championships, Eugene in July. The Commonwealth Games, Birmingham in August. The Diamond League final, Zurich in September.

To recharge, 2023 will largely be a break from competition, before her Paris 2024 campaign. She was just 2cm (plus a countback miss) short of gold in Tokyo.

“I was one jump away from gold! But I love that,” she says. “That was my first Olympics and now I think for Paris, people will say, ‘What’s on from here?’ I’ll say, ‘Well, the gold of course!’ It’s almost the best place in the world to be because if you have the gold, you have to hang on to that position. But if you’re silver, you think there’s more to come.”

Horsnell reckons she can jump 2.05 this year. Many years ago, he predicted for Athletics Australia that she could jump 2.10 around the time of the Paris Games; breaking the 2.09 world record that Bulgaria’s Stefka Kostadinova set in 1987.

It would be a big thing, but not everything.

“Putting my faith first was to train with my ‘why’ in my mind,” McDermott says. “Now, my ‘why’ was that I was in the sport because I wanted to reach other athletes, I wanted to be like that person was to me when I walked into Green Point Christian College the first time. I wanted to be an ambassador of what it was to be free from all of the performance-based identity and to be someone that could love other athletes. To tell them and connect them to Jesus.”