For a track and field athlete who had just won a silver medal at the European Championships in just his third major international outdoor event, high jumper Tobias Potye talked at length about what he did Not could. “A lot of people don’t even know that: I haven’t done a technical unit in the last two years,” he told the amazed audience who listened to Potye’s remarks on Thursday evening in the belly of Munich’s Olympic Stadium. No extensive work on the run-up, take-off and crossing the bar, with weights on the shoulders or resistance on the feet. He’s been struggling with aching tendons for years, or to put it another way: my body, said high-performance jumper Potye, “virtually doesn’t like competitive sports.” What a sentence.
When athletes talk about being “pain-free,” the vast majority mean: pain-free except for the usual pinching in the framework, without which no high-performance body can do. For Potye, his silver Thursday evening was special for two reasons: The athlete from LG Stadtwerke München tied the biggest success of his career so far, at 2.27 meters, in the Olympic Park where he trains almost every day. At the same time, he had once again made a small art form out of wringing a performance from his body that the body could not really carry in itself. “A medal was definitely the goal, so I can’t complain,” said Potye. You had to think: what would be possible if the 27-year-old could immerse himself in full training?
Potye was once a U20 European champion, four years ago, at 23, he had reached 2.27 meters. But sometimes, as he had admitted years ago, the tendon pains annoyed him so much that he questioned what he was doing. On the other hand, he certainly saw himself as a 2.30 meter jumper, but sometimes forgot that he had never mastered the heights. And athletics doesn’t exactly make it easy for those who are constantly hammering on the wall of breakthrough. The support is often manageable, the athletes trundle from smaller to medium-sized meetings, and even if they collect a lot of points for the world rankings, which meanwhile grants access to the major events (along with ever stricter access standards), it can be that it just isn’t enough, like Potye did before the Olympics last year. At that time he was even present at the Olympic outfitting.
“Actually, the time has come to beat the Tamberi,” he said
On the other hand: The fact that he was so close so often – at the 2.30 meters, an international starting place – shows that he is on the right path. Potye was at least so consistent recently that he got one of the coveted places in the sports promotion group of the Bundeswehr. Since then he has been able to afford to take a break from studying computer science, and he definitely wants to remain a high jump professional until the Summer Games in two years, he said in Munich.
Again a quiet self-confidence as a companion: Tobias Potye.
(Photo: Andrej Isakovic/AFP)
The tendons are also “not quite as bad a tightrope walk as in recent years”; that was contained in the diagnostic center of an association sponsor. Long train journeys are still “stupid” – when he traveled from Munich to the German championships in Berlin at the end of June, for example – but he was simply “strong in his head”. As we now know at the latest, Berlin was a turning point, even a comeback, as Potye thought back then. He had finally squirmed over those 2.30 meters, after a long competition in the heat, at the same height as Mateusz Przybylko, 2018 European champion at 2.35 meters. Przybylko also has some tales to tell about how a creaky body (and the grimness) can keep you grounded. On Thursday he was sixth, with 2.23 meters.
Sometimes the biggest barrier isn’t a bar, it’s your head. At the World Championships in Eugene, Potye recently said that he lost his tension during the preparations in California, but he checked that off. In Munich he carried such quiet self-confidence with him again. “Actually, the time has come to beat the Tamberi,” he said. If said Gianmarco Tamberi, the Tokyo Olympic champion, hadn’t swung 2.30 meters on Thursday – Potye would now be in possession of a shared gold medal. But Tamberi won’t hold his own forever, Potye promised. Probably at the latest when his body can be warmed up a little more for high-performance sports.