If you think University of South Dakota’s world class pole vaulter Chris Nilsen is all doom and gloom over the Summer Olympics being postponed, think again.
Sure, the three-time national champion, who has the third-highest pole vault in the world this year and would be a legitimate gold medal contender, was bummed on Friday, March 13, NCAAwhen the cancelled the NCAA Indoor Championships just after Nilsen and fellow competitors arrived. Around that time, the Summit League, and every other conference, cancelled the rest of its competitive season.
And sure, it stings that postponement of the Olympics (July 24 thru Aug. 9) would mean postponement of June’s U.S. Olympic trials, the event which qualifies athletes for the American team in the Olympics. Nilsen had already qualified for the trials, but his NCAA competition would continue to qualify him and give him more.
But pushing everything back a year might work out in favor for the senior from Kansas City, who plans on living and continuing to train in Vermillion up until whenever he gets his chance to punch his ticket to living his dream of being an Olympian.
“Thankfully, I’m 22 years old, so, yeah, I can wait,” Nilsen said, chuckling during a Monday interview with KWSN’s “Sports Talk with Craig and John.”
“It’ll give me more time to prepare, and I’ll probably be in a better spot next year to be prepared for the Olympics, anyway, because right now my main focus isn’t pole vaulting. Even if the Olympics wouldn’t be going on, it wouldn’t be. My main focus right now is getting a degree and finishing up my schooling. So, if the Olympics come around next year and the Olympic trials are in June, I’ll have nothing on my plate besides pole vault. At that point, I’ll be a little more mentally fresh.”
A refreshingly positive take from an athlete who was literally reaching the highest of heights, with the world’s third-best vault so far this year at 19 feet, 5.5 inches at a meet in Nebraska in late February — which also ranks the top collegiate vault in the nation in 2020.
That vault is one inch shy of his personal best, set at last year’s NCAA outdoor championships, which won him the national title.
But Nilsen said to say he was “peaking” in his sport just before it shut down wouldn’t be definitive. It’s more complicated than that. The body works in mysterious ways, and who knows if it would have been as healthy and ready as it would have needed to be in June to perform the best it ever has?
And more importantly, it is unknown how healthy and ready his body will be this time next season, when he might be granted an extra year of eligibility by the NCAA to continue to train and garner qualifying jumps for the Olympic trials.
Nilsen hasn’t done a pole vault in two weeks, when he and teammates were practicing before the NCAA Indoor Championships in New Mexico. That competition was cancelled and he and his Coyote teammates were sent back to Vermillion — 12 total hours of flying and driving.
And at the moment, he can’t train with USD pole vault coach Derek Miles, a Coyote alumnus and three-time Olympian who won the bronze medal at the 2008 Olympics.
But it is Miles being stationed in Vermillion that will keep Nilsen there until he can practice and compete again. He is hoping to get a job as “an athletic adviser or something like that” after he graduates in early May.
In the meantime, Nilsen is spending time at home like the rest of us in this time of social distancing, hanging out with his wife and playing with his two-year-old son, watching a lot of movies and learning all sorts of ways to cook eggs via Gordon Ramsey videos.
“It helps,” Nilsen said of the down time. “It’s settling. It’s something I should be doing always, but it gives me something more to do, the fact I get to spend more time with my son. I’m never going to complain about that.”
To hear the full interview with Nilsen on KWSN’s “Sports Talk with Craig & John,” click here.
