The gold medal winner at the 2025 World Athletics Championships in the high jump, Aussie Nicola Olyslagers, has been named the female field athlete of the year at the World Athletics Awards in Monaco.
Flying to the award ceremony meant that she missed an Open Doors’ event in Sydney, the Brother Andrew lecture, but she gave the charity a video testimony.
She told Open Doors’ Executive Director, Supporter Experience, Anna Hutchins, how sport had, for a time, come first in her life: “I started this journey when I was eight years old. So I’ve been going 20 years now, and one of the most defining ones in my life was back in 2017 [when I was] in a crossroads. My pursuit of sport and my pursuit of faith seemed to be colliding.
“So it was either/or: if I was putting my all into my sport, I felt like in my faith I was drifting. But if I was putting my all into following God, there was this stuck in my mind of, well, what am I doing about sport?
“And it really came to the point where I was in this crossroads situation. I was in Europe, and I was in a relationship that wasn’t honouring God. I lived my dream life, but yet, I had such a hunger. Because I knew there was so much more, and I had tasted things [of God], and I realised that I had cut them out in order to try and get further in my sporting pursuit.
“It was a really hard moment of recognising that when I tried to achieve in the situation that I was in, everything started falling apart.
“I did experience persecution in Europe quite heavily, around the place where I was staying, cutting off connections because I didn’t want to give up on that place. It really was then I had to have that moment of, ‘well is this worth giving up my dream?’ ‘Is pursuing worth it?’ because I couldn’t reconcile being the best in the world while staying in Australia.”
She made the tough decision to come back to Australia and live out her faith.
“I was living a life of compromise from my values as a teenager, because I didn’t know who I was in Christ. In 2017, I decided it had to be all or nothing. And leaving all of that, coming back to this, I was almost certain that sport wouldn’t be in the picture for me anymore. But I had this satisfaction of knowing I can’t earn and I can’t lose the beautiful gift of being a daughter of God. There’s no high jump to it. Once I grasped that, I heard God saying, ‘Go back to sport to build my life.’
Onslagers says her motives changed: “Not to gain medals for your own reasons and to make yourself feel good, but to do things with a heart to reach the lost athletes who are just like me growing up. So going into sport and really going into ministry within sport and creating spaces to reach athletes for the gospel, I experienced a lot of, I would say, backlash from when I was young and starting to be bold and not [yet] having world-class performances.
“I found that that was actually harder then, than it is now at the top.” She experienced ridicule, and her faith was tested.
“Deciding not to join in with certain ways of living caused a lot of isolation. But from that isolation, I continued to be the person that I was, that God blessed, and he showed me the opportunities I had rather than what I was losing.
“Year by year, I’ve just improved beyond what anybody thought.
“I am just really seeing that sport is the instrument that God is using to shape me and to mould me into becoming more in his image.”
Olyslagers muses nobody will want to see her at 60 trying out for the Olympic Games, yet she is sure she will have nobler and better goals to achieve.
Image: Olyslagers winning gold at the 2025 World Championships
The full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NedRkxgTeqo
Open Doors https://www.opendoors.org.au