Australian Nicola Olyslagers has defied the teeming rain to swan over the bar with just one bound and win her third Diamond League high jump in a row.<\/p>\n
The incessant downpour in Lausanne made it a fairly miserable night for athletes at the Swiss venue on Wednesday, local time, but you could not keep the smile from two-time Olympic silver medallist Olyslagers’s face as she pulled off a successful gamble to share a three-way victory.<\/p>\n
Deciding to be the last jumper to enter the competition at 1.91m, Olyslagers feared the worst the more the track got deluged.<\/p>\n
“This is a very wet competition, so I decided to be bold and start high, like I usually do when it’s good conditions, and when the rain started pouring down, then I was thinking, ‘have I made the right decision?'” Olyslagers said.<\/p>\n
“But in the end, it worked, because the one jump was the winning jump.”<\/p>\n
Indeed, that proved her only clearance of the night as she went on to share first place with Germany’s Christina Honsel \u2014 who had three successful jumps \u2014 and Poland’s Maria \u017bodzik, who had four. They all failed at 1.94m.<\/p>\n
Olyslagers’s perennial domestic rival Eleanor Patterson also cleared 1.91m, but a first-time failure at that height meant the other three shared the spoils.<\/p>\n
Ukraine’s Olympic champion Yaroslava Mahuchikh withdrew from the competition after two missed attempts at 1.86m and 1.91m, feeling it was not worth the risk with a wet run-up.<\/p>\n
The 28-year-old Olyslagers is in fine form leading into the world championships, her major target of the year, but success in the season-long Diamond League, the finals of which take place in Zurich next week, is another incentive.<\/p>\n