The jump into the Olympic year left Niklas Kaul in a bad mood. On the first day of the Eintracht Frankfurt Winter Cup on Saturday, the man from Mainz lifted himself over 4.60 meters with the bar, and the bar wouldn’t stay ten centimeters higher. “That’s annoying,” said the European decathlon champion, whose best performance is five meters. “But pole vaulting is my chaos discipline right now anyway.”
He will undertake further tests on the next two weekends – at the state championships of Rhineland-Palatinate in Ludwigshafen and those of Hesse – where he will once again compete out of competition in the Kalbach athletics hall. “I hope things go better then,” said the 25-year-old, who also tried to build up a bit of a competitive feeling over the weekend over 60 meters with and without hurdles in 8.35 and 7.44 seconds respectively. This was difficult to adapt to after a tough preparatory training session.
These were Kaul’s first appearances after his injury-related retirement from the World Championships in Budapest in August. At that time, the 2019 winner experienced a painful déjà vu when he sprained his ankle while taking off during the high jump. It wasn’t nearly as bad as 2021 in Tokyo, when a similar misstep catapulted him prematurely out of the Olympic medal dream, says the athlete. In Hungary, the task before the subsequent 400-meter run served not least to avoid taking any risks a year before the next games in Paris this summer.
There are still seven months left until the Olympics
But the two disappointments were not to remain without consequences. After Kaul started training again after a corona illness that struck him immediately after the World Cup, he switched sides. Instead of using his right foot, he now pushes himself off the ground with his left when doing a high jump. “I definitely don’t want to experience something like that in Tokyo and Budapest again,” says the all-rounder. He tried it out two years ago and jumped over two meters after three months of training. “Now we have more time, I am confident that it will work well.”
Kaul benefits from the change from always training on both sides in the fall to avoid imbalances. But also about the fact that he played handball for a long time as a student before he concentrated entirely on athletics due to time constraints. “As a right-handed player, I also had to jump off with my left,” he says. “But I have to learn anew some things that are self-evident on the right,” for example the “slightly different feeling for crossing the bar.” There are still seven months left until the Olympics. Kaul narrowly cracked the necessary standard with 8,484 points at the meeting in Ratingen, and he wants to confirm it at the European Championships in Rome in June and defend his title in the process.
In order to increase his best score of 8,691 points from 2019, he recently sweated more in the weight room. “Otherwise I would get back problems relatively quickly,” now my body allows for more frequent sessions with more series. This could be because after submitting his bachelor’s thesis in November, Kaul only works three hours a week as a research assistant for the physicists at Mainz University in Paris and is thus dedicating himself more intensively to the often neglected “little things”, as he calls exercises with them the basic structure is stabilized and the muscles are made more flexible.
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Apart from a gymnastics exam, which he still has to take in February, Kaul doesn’t want to resume his teaching studies in physics and sports and start his master’s degree until after the games. He doesn’t assume that he could miss it, this balance that otherwise protects him from not only having sport on his mind. “If I knew I was going to be doing this for four or five years, it would certainly be difficult,” he says. Recently, there were other things on the side that distracted him. For example, his role as an ambassador for the Munich games of the European Handball Championship, which also ensured that he was there for the Germans’ opening victory. “That was fun,” says the individual athlete.
In August, Kaul wants to be one of those who attract the nation’s attention again and, at best, reach for his first Olympic medal without tensing up. “In sport you can only work towards one chance and there is no guarantee that it will work out,” says Kaul. There are simply competitions that don’t work. “But when that happens during a major event, you are of course in a bad mood for longer than just one day.”
