Meet the USD grad going for Olympic gold

By Mick Garry, for Pigeon605

Tokyo was awarded the 2020-21 Summer Olympics in September 2013. Chris Nilsen was 15 at the time, already showing at least some evidence that representing the USA in Japan as a pole vaulter wasn’t such an outlandish dream as it might be for most others his age.

What is most remarkable eight years later is how steadily the possibility progressed. It never seemed crazy, even when coupled with the pole vault’s history of peaks and valleys among its most elite competitors.

By the time he was a senior at Park Hill High School in Kansas City, Missouri, he had broken the national record for prep athletes with a vault of 18 feet, 4.75 inches.

At the University of South Dakota with coach Derek Miles, a three-time Olympian in the event who won a bronze medal in Beijing in 2008, the climb continued. With it came accolades and recognitions on a yearly basis that got difficult to follow.

More simply measured among the national collegiate titles, All-American honors and a berth in the 2016 Olympic Trials was a bar that kept rising.

Pole vaulting has many similarities to golf. Mechanical video analysis accompanies every move of every muscle. It is also, like golf, much more about delivering 95 percent of one’s maximum on demand than it is having the capacity to capture 100 percent of it once in a while.

Nilsen can say now — and could not say for sure up until June at the U.S. Olympic Trials — that he could stare down a lifetime dream without letting any of the details get in the way of that.

“The Olympics come around just once every four years,” Nilsen said. “It can be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a lot of athletes. Consistently jumping 19 feet one year is difficult to do the next year. We just hope we can stay on that path and continue upwards and try to stay consistent and healthy throughout my career.”

Blessed with speed and leaping ability — he also was inching toward 7 feet in the high jump when he began concentrating on the pole vault — there likely are several sports he could have been very good at had fate steered him off in another direction.

First, however, he was a soccer player who aspired to play the sport in college.

 In ninth grade, his coaches told him he should be doing some offseason training.

He wasn’t sure that was the best way to spend his time, so he explored other options.

“My out was playing another sport in the spring,” Nilsen said. “The only other coach I knew was the pole vault coach, who was my English teacher in seventh and eighth grade. So I talked to her (Stephanie Yuen) and then began working with Rick Attig as a private coach. Then I started going pretty high.”

He went from not being able to execute any height with a pole in his hands to 17 feet in a span of six months. It turns out he was born for this kind of thing.

He graduated from high school as the top pole vaulter in the nation and then began working with Miles, who already had established his alma mater as “Pole Vault University” by the time Nilsen arrived. Nothing has changed much since then. Nilsen is a professional now — he graduated last summer — but his coach is still Miles, who also will be going to Tokyo.

“One of the things you’re looking for is kids who just love their sport,” said Lucky Huber, director of track and field at USD, in 2017, when Nilsen was first starting to make an impact at the college level. “There are kids who are good at things but don’t necessarily love it. Chris loves pole vaulting. We saw that on the visit. He and Derek were able to develop that deep kinship because they both love it. They love the process of focusing on it and getting good at it, and I think Chris realizes Derek is well-suited to get him to the same places Derek has been. He’s not just a coach to Chris, he’s a mentor.”

Four years later, the pairing continues to get results that wouldn’t be so easy to see if these two didn’t get along most of the time. Coach-player relations aren’t easy to begin with. Then throw in a level of expectation reserved for those who are the best in the world at something.

“We have a mutual understanding and a mutual respect for each other,” Nilsen said. “I think that’s how we’ve been able to keep the coach-athlete relationship going forward.”

In pursuit of being the best in the world, Nilsen and Miles have figured it out well enough to be able to put Nilsen in a situation at the Olympic Trials to hit his first six attempts in succession. He was the only one to hit 5.90 meters, or 19 feet, 4 1/4 inches.

Nilsen has had situations in the past where he won under dramatic circumstances, but qualifying for the Olympics a year after it was postponed by the pandemic was not among them. He got to 19-4 1/4 without a miss and was a lock from there.

“I felt like a small child having a sensory overload,” Nilsen said, assessing the moments after he realized he was an Olympian. “I felt so many things all at the same time. It was a hundred different emotions all at once. It was satisfaction, happiness, achievement, pride — all these things.”

Miles has been the guy helping him aim all that gusto in the right directions.

“We both have obligations to each other,” Nilsen said. “They’re not necessarily unspoken — I’d call them our ‘rules of engagement.’ One of the biggest reasons I was able to jump high at USD is because Derek and the USD team gave me the culture that allowed me to be successful and taught me how to be successful. My payment is to help out with the team now when he asks me and helping with that culture that I came into. It’s so that the next guy who comes in like me can benefit from that same culture. There have been bumps — we’re humans — but with Derek there have been the fewest bumps of anyone I’ve known in my life.”

It can be difficult, time-consuming, expensive and suspenseful getting poles from point A to another continent, but that’s part of every trip that includes air travel over a large body of water. More distinctive on this trip will be charging into a protocol-heavy bubble designed to ensure his safety and that of the other athletes in the midst of a pandemic. He’ll have nothing to compare it to, of course, so this Olympics’ ultimate weirdness won’t be quite as strange as it might be for someone who’d competed on this world stage in the past.

Pandemic precautions as distractions will be equally distributed in any case and seem like trivial inconveniences in comparison to closing the deal on the dream of a lifetime.

The men’s pole vault competition starts July 30 with finals Aug. 3.

“I want to pole vault as much as I can and be as good as I possibly can,” Nilsen said.

“I used to say I always want to win and I always want to be the best. Now for me, it’s more about making sure I have fun with it and do well. I’ve accomplished some things I wanted to accomplish, but now whenever I go to a meet with bigger stakes, I want to do something more with it. It’s a constant linear progression of what I want to do with it, but I’m content to get there by having fun with it.”