Athletics
How I became pro: Morgan Lake
GB’s high-jump sensation on her love of sport and balancing world-beating ambitions with a university degree.
At the age of 18, when most of us were stumbling – red-eyed and pasta-dependent – into adulthood, Morgan Lake was representing Great Britain at her firsts Olympics. Jumping a PB in the semis, she earned herself a place in the final, where she eventually finished as the joint-10th best female high jumper in the world – shortly before starting her first year at university.
"The Olympics [were] amazing," she says, "and making the final was just incredible. Although I was excited for the final, I almost couldn't believe I was in it in the first place. It was kind of overwhelming."
Now 24, Lake is already in her seventh year in the Senior British Athletics squad and has two Olympic finals under her belt; in a sporting sense, she is already something of a veteran.
The early years
Morgan found her love for athletics at a very young age
© Morgan Lake
Morgan celebrates breaking the under-17 record at the World Youth Champs
© Christopher Lee / Stringer / Getty Images Sport / Getty Images
“I've been doing athletics since I was five or six,” she says, and even before that, Lake’s father Eldon – who worked as her coach before she started at Loughborough Uni – took her to her first athletics meet when she was “about one”. Although naturally talented as a kid, it’s clear that a genuine passion for athletics – and sport in general – has played a role in Lake’s rise to the top.
“I don’t think there was a sport I didn’t try when I was younger,” she says. “Swimming, tennis, gymnastics, hockey – you name it! And because I was always on the go, I never thought of what I was doing as training; it was more that I really enjoyed sport and I liked being with my friends, so I guess I was training a lot, but I never thought of it like that.”
Although she eventually settled on athletics, a childhood spent doing every sport under the sun goes some way to explaining Lake’s entry into the multi-discipline world of pentathlon and, later, heptathlon. “My first event was when I was about 12: a pentathlon in Exeter,” she says. "I recently spent ages searching for exactly what event it was, but got to about page 50 on Google then gave up!”
Sending records tumbling
But if that particular event was hard to find, early success certainly wasn’t. In 2009, Lake’s 3,046 points broke the British under-13 pentathlon record, and two years later she had established herself as the UK’s best ever under-15 pentathlete with a record-breaking 3,755 points. If ever an athlete seemed destined to reach the summit of their sport, it was Morgan Lake.
Destiny, however, can only be prescribed in hindsight, and 2013 was to provide a twist in the tale of Lake’s fledgling career as a multi-event athlete. First came success – a silver medal at the British Indoor Champs – only in the high jump, rather than her preferred heptathlon. Then, at the World Youth Championships later that year, Lake’s growing reputation as a high jumper was enhanced when, competing as a heptathlete, she broke the British under-17 record with a 1.90m jump – enough to win the competition’s individual event outright.
I had a lot of pressure on me in 2013. I was going for gold, and things didn’t work out. But I think that helped me going into 2014, because I had less expectation on my shoulders
The Championships ended on a sour note, however, when Lake – the pre-competition favourite – crashed out with three faults in the long jump and a disappointing performance in the javelin. But the pressure to perform on a world stage had become too much for the 15-year-old, who was at the time studying for her exams.
“I've always been very driven,” she says, “but when you're a teenager there are obviously lots of distractions – you want to be with your friends and doing whatever they’re doing – and when it got to GCSE and A Level time, I wanted to revise and do well in my exams.”
Pressure came from all fronts, but where others (adults, let alone 15-year-olds) might have suffered from such an experience, Lake says she used it to her advantage: “I had a lot of pressure on me in 2013. I was going for gold, and things didn’t work out. But I think that helped me going into 2014, because I had less expectation on my shoulders and I wasn't one of the favourites – I think I was ranked fourth in the heptathlon and maybe fifth or sixth going in the high jump – so I didn't really have that pressure to perform.”
The breakthrough year
If 2013 was disappointing, 2014 was a bounce-back of epic proportions. In a single year, Lake broke the world youth record for pentathlon, became the youngest ever winner of Multistars – a prestigious international event – in her first senior year as a heptathlete, and broke the junior high jump world record (that had stood since 1991) with a clearance of 1.93m. As if that wasn’t quite enough achievement for a 12-month period, Lake then became the only British athlete to win double gold, in heptathlon and high jump, at the World Junior Championships. If a lack of pressure had contributed to her performances throughout the year, that luxury was now very much removed by her world-beating form.
"When you win something like that,” she says, “you get quite excited. I was thinking, 'I'm going to progress each year and by 2016, who knows, I could be Olympic champion!' But obviously in sport nothing is going to be that easy – you can't just churn progress out like that.”
A new chapter
Morgan competes in the women's pentathlon at IAAF World Championship, 2016
© Aaron Rogosin / Red Bull Content Pool
In 2017, however, Morgan proved you could. She jumped a PB of 1.96m at the British Athletics Indoor Championships in Birmingham, catapulting her to third in the UK all-time rankings, and sixth in the world. And later that year she made the high jump final of the World Athletics Championships, to finish sixth overall.
After a breakthrough year, Morgan made the bold decision to abandon heptathlon and put her full focus on high jump – a decision which quickly paid off.
In March 2018, she jumped consecutive 1.93m clearances at the IAAF World Indoor Champs and Commonwealth Games to secure respective fourth and second-place finishes.
I never thought that I wouldn’t be doing heptathlon. I never even considered doing just one event, so it was a difficult transition to make
But despite her amounting silverware, making the shift from heptathlon to high jump wasn't easy. “I never thought that I wouldn’t be doing heptathlon,” she says. “I never even considered doing just one event, so it was a difficult transition to make.”
For Lake one of the key challenges came in learning to lighten the load: “Initially I found the training quite difficult, because you have to almost train less. There’s also the fact that your mind is so focused on one thing, whereas in the heptathlon there’s less time to overthink because you have so many different events to focus on. Luckily me and my coach have adapted my training approach now, so I am still training more like a heptathlete and incorporating more multi-event work into my sessions, which suits my mindset a lot better.”
Finding a balance
Uni has helped Morgan strike a balance between sport and everyday life
© Greg Coleman / Red Bull Content Pool
Since deciding to focus solely on the high jump, Lake has established herself as the sixth best in the world, won the British Championships and equalled the British women's all-time record jump of 1.97m.
But while the life of an elite athlete and that of an undergraduate student might seem incompatible, Lake believes her studies have helped to focus her mind. It helps, too, that she’s based at the best sports university on the planet. "Being at Loughborough keeps me focused,” she says. “I live with a few athletes but I also live with a few coursemates so that helps me keep that balance of normal life and sport – you see people training hard, but also trying to get a degree, so it keeps you grounded.”
That said, she admits to being no stranger to the last-minute essay. “I don’t balance the two as well as I probably could! I think I leave my work until the last minute quite a lot. I’m still really enjoying my degree and I want to do as well as I can in it, but I think first year and second year I put a bit too much pressure on myself academically. Luckily I've managed to split my final year, so I've got a bit more time to work on my degree.”
I live with a few athletes but I also live with a few coursemates so that helps me keep that balance of normal life and sport
And life at Loughborough has been beneficial for another reason: it’s perhaps the only place in the country where being an elite athlete is the norm. “I'm around so many international athletes each day, and my best friends are some of the top athletes in the world, so for me everything seems quite normal." There are still times, though, when she has to pinch herself.
“When you take a step out of it, and you have family and friends taking pictures of you on the TV, it's definitely a bit like, wow! And you remember how big it all is.”
To find out about how other Red Bull athletes made it to the top, head to the Red Bull Pro hub.