In celebration of the 2024 Summer time Olympics and Paralympics in Paris, GLAMOUR has launched Change The Document, a collection devoted to the ladies of Group GB, who’re flipping the narrative on what it means to be an elite feminine athlete, from competing on their durations, balancing coaching with being pregnant and motherhood, navigating physique picture pressures, and sure, chasing world data.
Right here, we chat with Morgan Lake, Group GB’s excessive bounce competitor at this 12 months’s Olympics, about her experiences with body-shaming as an athlete, the gender pay hole and her expertise at Paris 2024…
Morgan Lake is aware of a factor or two about resilience. The Group GB excessive jumper has competed on the athletics world stage because the age of simply 17 – taking the inevitable (and literal) highs and lows in her stride alongside the way in which. In actual fact, it is the knockbacks which have made her hungrier for achievement than ever.
“There are times that I’ve looked back at my career and thought about missed opportunities, or I’ll wonder how many medals I could have got by now,” she says after we converse over Zoom simply weeks earlier than Paris 2024. “But then, that’s also the thing that keeps me in the sport and so hungry to achieve that.”
She is probably referencing her – in her personal phrases – “heartbreaking” retirement from the excessive bounce Olympic finals at Tokyo 2020, after sustaining a foot damage that pressured her to withdraw, or her sudden fourth end on the World Athletics Indoor Championship in Glasgow in March, the place she simply missed a medal.
“When that day does come and I do stand on a podium at a global final, it will feel so much sweeter,” she says, with quiet confidence. “It won’t have just happened accidentally. As a kid, you can get a PB every week – or for me, getting junior medals and European junior medals – I probably didn’t fully appreciate those moments. Whereas now… I mean, it’s been 10 years since I was last on a global podium, which is a really long time. But I’m also like, okay, but I’ve learned so much in those 10 years – I can just kind put it towards motivation.”
Sadly, those hopes of an Olympic medal weren’t to be in Paris – Morgan finished a surprise 15th in her qualifying round, meaning she didn’t progress to the high jump finals to compete for a podium. Ever positive, she soon shared her understandable heartbreak on Instagram, before looking ahead to the future.
“No Olympic final for me this time round,” she wrote. “I’m sorry to the people who have supported me all year and I’m so grateful to have made it to 3 Olympics. 10 years of back to back senior championships is something I can be proud of. Not been the season of dreams like last year, but at some point I’m sure it’ll all come back round again. A bit of time needed to reflect.”
