Tilt[ed.14, 2026]
To qualify for the 2024 Olympics in the long jump, you needed to jump a qualifying distance of 6.86m, or be ranked in the top 32 in the world. Rankings are based on your best five competitions across the qualifying period, with higher status competitions offering more ranking points.
At the start of the 2024 season, I estimated that I would need to jump around 6.50m five times in the qualifying period — and at my highest ranking meets — to qualify in the top 32 athletes.
If you’d asked me in January of that year if I believed I could do it, I would have said yes. I didn’t think it would be easy, or even necessarily likely, but for the first time since I uttered the goal out loud several years earlier, I felt confident that I could.
Sometimes you’ll hear athletes — or anyone that’s achieved big things — claim some kind of ‘I always knew I was going to do it’. I’ve never felt that kind of endless confidence about anything. When I moved to Sydney in 2019, I was almost embarrassed to admit that I wanted to try and qualify for the Olympics, it felt so out of reach.
But what 10 years of track and field taught me is this: there are two kinds of belief, and just because you do not ‘feel’ it, doesn’t mean you can’t construct it.