A Westport high-jumper is hoping to scale new heights

Raising the bar

Pamela Hughes is hoping to scale new heights

Daniel Carey

“I DON’T look to jump over seven-foot bars; I look around for one-foot bars that I can step over.” So said Warren Buffett, and from that line, you understand why Buffett was a financier and investment businessman rather than an athlete. Motivational gurus are always urging people to ‘raise the bar’, but only a few people get to do that literally.
Meet high jumper Pamela Hughes. The Westport Athletic Club member is currently taking a well-earned rest, after a busy season which included jumping a personal best of 1.80 metres and reaching the final of the World Junior Championships. The ‘Worlds’ took place in Bydgoszcz, Poland, and an outstanding jump of 1.78 meant she qualified for the final of her event, one of only three Irish athletes to do so. Despite a few close attempts, she didn’t get beyond 1.73 in the final, and finished 13th, but the memories of the event will remain with her.
“It was a really, really good experience,” she told The Mayo News. “There were 22 of us [Irish competitors] out there, and so many different athletes. You got to meet lots of people from different countries – we were staying with some of them in [our] accommodation.”
It has, she says, been a ‘pretty good’ season. A student at Brunel University in west London, she jumped 1.80 at the British University Championships, gaining the qualifying standard for the Worlds in the process, and won the National Juniors with a jump of 1.75. This the 19-year-old’s last year competing at Junior level, as she will be in among the U-23s next year. She’s also done her fair share of Senior events, finishing second in the recent National Senior Championships despite only jumping 1.70 – a mark she puts down to fatigue after coming back from the Worlds. After a three-week break, she’ll soon be back into winter training.
“I’d be training six days a week,” she explains. “I’d have two weights sessions, a plyometric session … I wouldn’t start jumping until near enough the indoor season. I do a lot of running during the winter, and circuits, just to get in good condition ... Coming up to the Worlds was really the first time I really tapered down my training, and I wouldn’t have done as much weights.”
She’ll return to university at the end of September. She’s on a scholarship and going into the second year of a three-year course in sports science. Brunel is one of the most highly-regarded athletics nurseries in Britain – Roger Bannister, the first man to run a four-minute mile, received an honorary degree there last month, and the university team won the indoor inter-varsity title. And what’s next on Pamela Hughes’s agenda?
“The European U-23s are on next year,” she says. “They haven’t officially told us the standard for it yet, but I think it’s 1.83. And then there’s also the World Student Games, and the standard for that will be 1.86, I think.”
A case of onwards and upwards, then. Watch this space.