The 23-years-old Finland pole vaulter Wilma Murto won the European women’s title at the European Athletics Championships in Munich. The young athlete already secured the gold at 4.80m, but then she also attempted at 4.85m, and by overcoming this height she set three national records for Finland and equaled the championship record of Katerina Stefanidi, who fell from the European top.
Asked about her behavior in the final stages of the race, she laughed and replied: “That’s something me and my coach have always done – the race isn’t over until it’s over. I could feel that 4.85m. The coach had already told me: ‘No, no more, 4.80m is good. Now we have the gold medal’. And I said to myself: ‘I’ll go one more time’. I felt I had one more height left to jump, I had it with me and I wanted to do it one more time”.
From the sidelines, Wilma Murto’s progress towards the European title seemed strangely reversed – the higher the bar, the easier it became for her.
She looked out of medal contention in the early stages, requiring two attempts to clear 4.55m and 4.65m and passed after one failure at 4.70m. But then came first successes at 4.75m and 4.80m before her final success at 4.85m.
How can we explain this phenomenon?
“When the bar was 4.65m or lower, I felt like I was holding back a bit, I was trying to be safe with the jumps, and it didn’t work. When the medal was secure I felt my senses just open up and that was the flow moment – it started from there. Now I have nothing to lose, I have what I wanted – and I want it now! I felt like I handled my nerves pretty well – and it also felt pretty smooth by the end”, said Wilma Murto. “I vaulted with three different poles throughout the competition. The last pole I vaulted I had only used it once, at the World Championships in Eugene last month”, added she.
For Wilma Murto, it was, literally and metaphorically, a return to the heights after a strong maiden career of immense promise and achievement.
On January 31, 2016, aged 17, she set an under-20 girls’ world record of 4.71m, and later that year she won the world bronze for that age, before adding European under-20 bronze in 2017
Wilma Murto competed at the Rio 2016 Olympics and at the last European Athletics Championships in Berlin four years ago, where he finished 17th in the qualifiers.
She also failed to qualify for the World Championships in Doha before the pandemic curtailed sporting activities.
Sixth place at last year’s European Athletics Indoor Championships was followed by a respectable fifth at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, but her performance at the World Championships in Eugene last month, where she finished sixth, was the biggest indicator of what she can achieve in Munich.
“Eugene was very important, a great experience. I had a bad injury in January and we were counting the days if we had enough time to race there. I broke my leg – I landed badly in January at a race in France and hurt the side of my leg. I was in a cast for two months. But we had enough time and in Eugene, I felt like I had jumped in me. And I felt very at ease knowing that it was already in me. I just have to let it happen”, said Wilma Murto
Asked to reflect on the course of her career so far, she replied: “It’s a lot of persistence. That’s a lot of faith in the ability to get back to the level I was at. My team believed in me all this time”.
