Hamish Kerr from New Zealand with his Olympic gold medal after winning the men’s high jump final in Paris 2024. Photo: PHOTOSPORT
Olympic high jump champion Hamish Kerr admits he still looks at his gold medal every couple of days to confirm that he really did win in Paris.
Kerr is back home after deciding to finish the European season early so he could celebrate his success.
It has been a remarkable year for the 28-year-old. He won the World Indoor title in Glasgow in March, picked up a couple of Diamond League wins and then last month achieved Olympic glory in a dramatic jump-off with American Shelby McEwan.
He was originally scheduled to compete in the Diamond League Finals in Belgium this weekend, but instead decided to return home and enjoy what he had achieved.
"As athletes we're heavily process driven and you go to an athletics meeting knowing what you want to achieve and I think after the year I'd had I felt I'd achieved everything I'd wanted to," Kerr told RNZ.
"I got the sense that I was suppressing some emotion just to get back on the tour and I felt that wasn't really appropriate given the situation I was in."
So the Cantabrian has come home to soak it all in and the celebrations continue.
"I haven't got it out of my system, but I have had a chance to celebrate, there is certainly going to be a few more weeks of it."
Kerr gets stopped on the street with people congratulating him and has a number of events including school visits lined up.
The centre of the celebrations, the gold medal, is in his bedside table.
"Every couple of days I open it up and it's definitely starting to feel more real and at the same time it's pretty crazy that I've got one that is my own."
Gold medalist New Zealand high jumper Hamish Kerr reacts after winning an Olympic gold medal in Paris, 2024. Photo: PHOTOSPORT
Kerr admitted he was yet to fully grasp what being an Olympic champion will mean for him but he knew it would help in terms of career opportunities.
"Obviously a lot more people want me at their athletic competitions now and there is now the ability to plan a really good season around what we want to do given I have so much more sway.
"But it hasn't really sunken in nationally in terms of what it means for my profile around New Zealand so its something that I'm starting to contend with. It's always fun to have people want to shake your hand in the street."
Kerr said the biggest thing he could take from his Olympic win was the trust in all the work they had done over the last couple of years.
"I got a real sense that going into those hard moments (this year) they were actually easier than the training we did.
"We put such a high price on the technical changes and the consistency in training that when you get to the big one it was almost like the pressure was off and now it was just time to execute."
He said that trust was important as he faced elimination during qualifying and if things had been different he may have now been talking about retirement rather than his success.
Kerr planned to start training again in early November with the World Championships in Japan the focus for 2025.
