What happened, Jacques Freitag?

He is one of only eight athletes to have won IAAF world athletics championships at youth, junior and senior level. He is in good company too. That list of eight includes Usain Bolt, Veronica Campbell-Brown and Yelena Isinbayeva, amongst others. But how did it come to be that the man who became world champion at the age of 21 would find himself on the wrong side of the law 9 years later and without any further distinction in his career? 

Forsbury Flop: Jacque Freitag. Half Fulfilled Potential.

I remember the hype around Jacques Freitag when he won gold at the World Athletics Championships in Paris in 2003. He was supposed to be the next great South African sports star, an equal to Hestrie Cloete the South African female high jumper the two-time women’s high jump world champion who had also won gold in Paris that year. I remember thinking that he would turn out to be the next South African Olympian to win a gold medal. In 2004 he had to withdraw from the South African track and field team to participate at the Athens Olympics because of a recurring ankle injury and at the time was quoted as saying: "I've decided to go for the long-term plan. The ligament is totally shredded and needs to be replaced. I'm still young, turning 22 this year, so I should have at least two more Olympic Games in me." But that wasn’t to be as he never featured in either of the Games in Beijing or London.

Ivan Ukhov won the men’s High Jump event at this year’s Olympic Games in London with a leap of 2, 38 metres, which incidentally is Jacques Freitag’s personal best leap, a mark he cleared in 2005. Since that year, Freitag virtually disappeared from the South African sporting landscape. 

He had a run in with the law in 2006 after he and a friend allegedly assaulted a 17 year old schoolboy. 

Freitag never returned to his supreme best. He did try to make a comeback from injury but in 2009 retired from the sport following more surgeries to his damaged ankle. Soon after retiring, Freitag established an academy for jumpers in partnership with the High Performance Centre in Pretoria and unsuccessfully attempted comebacks in 2010 and in 2011 but the giant athlete was reduced to only a shadow of his former self. His best jump in 2010 was a dismal 2, 05 metres.

This past weekend, Freitag was arrested and remanded in custody by Police in Pretoria for the possession of the drug Cat (methcathinone). 

I don’t know if anything infuriates me in sport more than stories of incredibly talented athletes who only half fulfil their potential, whether it is through, injury, injustices or indeed their own actions. I can’t speak for Jacques Freitag and I don’t know what all the circumstances that led to him being bust for drug possession or the circumstances around his failed career were. It is a difficult thing to say, but at the end of the day that is what we have to deal with, the fact that despite all his talent and early achievements, Jacques Freitag was a bright talent with an even brighter career that never was.