Shaw has the courage to dream big, and the backing to realise it

WHEN high jumper Erin Shaw is asked whether she’s daring to dream about competing at the 2024 Paris Olympics, it is to the 19-year-old New South Wales Institute of Sport (NSWIS) scholarship athlete’s eternal credit that she doesn’t even blink, let alone hide her feelings.

“Yes, I am allowing myself to,” she said with an unmistakeable enthusiasm in her voice. “Obviously, it’s a big dream . . . a big goal . . . which is a bit scary, but they’re meant to be!

 Shaw will take her next step towards her Olympic dream on the weekend when she joins coach Alex Stewart and squad mates, 2022 world champion Eleanor Patterson and Tokyo Olympic finalist, Brandon Starc, to train at a High Performance facility in the Japanese capital of Tokyo.

The teenager, who represented Australia at last year’s world athletics championships in Budapest where she watched Patterson take silver, fixed her sights on high jump after trying her hand at surf lifesaving, swimming, dancing, touch football and netball.

While every training session provides Shaw with new opportunities to reach her goal of just jumping as high as she can, she hasn’t forgotten one of her earliest lessons.

“What I’m learning is the way to deal with the pressure of a high jump contest is about focussing on you,” said Shaw, who announced her potential when she cleared an impressive 1.77m as a 15 year old. “You can’t change anything else but yourself, and the key is trying not to over think things. Focus on the basics . . . run . . . jump.”

Shaw, who came fourth at the world junior championships two years ago with a leap of 1.88m – the highest ever by a female Aussie high jumper at that competition – said training alongside Starc and Patterson, the former world champion she’s openly described as a role model, was a blessing that had also opened her eyes.

“Being able to train around them and get to know them as people is good because [you realise] you don’t need to be anything ‘crazy special,’” she said. “You’ve just got to work hard, and you’ll get there.”

Patterson, who was named in the Australian Olympic Team at the conclusion of the recent Nationals in Adelaide, has said before that watching Shaw evolve into something special brings back memories.`

“Training alongside Erin in our squad has been incredible to see her coming along, and it does feel like in some ways I’m looking at my younger self going through the process,” said Patterson. “We are similar in a lot of ways . . . though, she might not be happy with that [laughs].

“First and foremost, she’s an incredible person and has high expectations of her herself, but the biggest thing for Erin is she has the world at her feet. There’s no doubt she going to do incredibly well in her career because she has so many things in her headspace. She’s cool, calm, and collected, and she’s able to handle herself well because she’s quite mature for her age.

“My only advice for Erin is to appreciate the little wins. It’s so easy within your athletic mindset to continually want to push for more and more and more so that you never really sit in the moment and feel gratitude for ‘hey, that was pretty cool, I need to pat myself on the back for that.’

“[When I was her age] I would think: ‘oh, that was cool, but whatever’ and I’d push forward thinking ‘now more, now more, now more.’ Even though I had a hiatus from athletics, I feel as though I’m a veteran in the athletic team having been at [the Commonwealth] Games since I was 18, so I think it’s important for Erin – or any athlete – to take the little wins and to appreciate how far you’ve come and to realise it is epic.

“You need to do that because it’s so easy to be carried away with that feeling of ‘I want more’ or even comparison. [I advise people from comparing themselves to others because] comparison is the thief of joy.”

And it’s expected Patterson, who is preparing for her third Olympic campaign, would also encourage Shaw to embrace her dream of taking on the world’s best by competing in Paris.

Daniel Lane, NSWIS