The Olympic high jump champion worked as a substitute teacher and violated the physical integrity of the student. The reality of the school world was a shock to him.
Olympic high jump champion Stephen Holm48, the beard is already growing, so to speak, the last color, but the waist is tight and the body is still athletic.
Urheilu met the sports legend on Sunday at the Swedish team’s hotel in Rome after Holm’s 19-year-old son Melwin Lykke Holm had jumped the qualifying competition in his first adult competition. The result was elimination from the final competition with a score of 217.
– Melwin got sick during the Games, so the result is not a disaster. He was the youngest jumper in the group.
Stefan Holm is known as a sympathetic and intelligent man. Now you can see from his being that there are many other things weighing on his mind than the progress of the boy’s high jumping career.
He dragged you by the arm
There is a background here: Holm was reported to the Karlstad police three weeks ago. According to the report, on his first day of work as a substitute teacher at a local school, he violated the physical integrity of a student by dragging him by the arm to his seat in the classroom.
The work as a deputy ended, and Holm has publicly admitted that he acted as described. It can be seen from the man that the negative publicity that followed the incident has deeply hurt the sports legend, who is used to a different kind of media attention.
– With this information, I should have stayed out of the school world. My sister is a teacher and she had told me how restless it is in Swedish schools these days. I belong to a generation that is very used to a different kind of home and school discipline, so the reality was still even a shock.
Holm had thought that his long experience as a sports coach would have been a good pedagogical basis for a substitute teacher.
– However, the difference is that children and young people come to sports training voluntarily and willingly. Going to school is an obligation.
Holm emphasizes that she is not protesting the publicity the incident has received or the fact that the criminal complaint is under investigation and will eventually progress to prosecution.
“Things go out of proportion”
– When it comes to a public figure, like me, things naturally go out of proportion.
Let’s change the subject to high jump, which Holm prefers to talk about. At the Olympic Games in Athens on August 22, 2004, there was a great performance from the Swedes, when Holm and the triple jumper Christian Olsson won Olympic gold that same evening.
– My shadow has been a big one for Melwin, that’s for sure. In his competitions, he has heard at least enough times whose son it is. It was easier for me because my father (Johnny Holm) was an ordinary worker who coached me in the evenings, says Stefan Holm, whose coaching team includes a total of three athletes.
The problem familiar from Finland has not escaped wealthy Sweden either:
– In traditional individual sports, it is very difficult to support yourself by coaching.
Became a writer
Holm has now applied for additional employment from a surprising direction. After his biography Stefan Holm – Höjdhoppare, the man has written one sports information book and one sports quiz book. Now he becomes his current life partner Jessica Eriksson’s with to the fiction market with Chateau vid vägens slut i.e. Castle at the end of the road.
Holm belongs to the group of 16 men who, either outside or in the gym, have left a bar set to at least 240 centimeter. The last time that height was exceeded was in 2018. 240 of the Europeans have last exceeded it, in September 2014, by a Ukrainian Bogdan Bondarenko.
For example, the three previous European Championship golds have been won with results of 230, 235 and 232.
– In high jumping, development has stopped and even regressed compared to many other sports. If you win with such results in the prestigious competitions, it doesn’t force you to try even harder, says Holm, who in her record jump of 240 in the Madrid hall in 2005 exceeded her own height by 59 cents.
It is the ME result in this field that Holm shares with the American Franklin Jacobs with.