Nettey

After a 2020 season largely cancelled during the COVID-19 pandemic, Christabel Nettey got back on the runway in a real way in 2021. Competing in 10 events from April in June, Nettey had nine podium finishes, including a win on home soil at La Classique d’Athlétisme de Montréal at the end of June.

Before competition shut down in 2020, Nettey enjoyed a good season in 2019. She finished fifth in her first Diamond League meet of the season in Doha, and then went on to win the Harry Jerome Track Classic in June.

The only quibble might be that, after a great season in 2018, the Surrey, B.C., athlete has yet to lock into the ‘zone’ and sustain top performance for a string of meets over the past couple of years. Which probably would be to damn the seven-time Canadian Champion and national recorder with her own early career brilliance.

In 2018, her season’s best jump of 6.92 metres – just seven centimetres off her Canadian record – to win the Queensland International Classic in Brisbane, Australia, was the fifth-best jump in the World last year, which is significant.

Nettey also had the seventh-best jump of the season, a 6.88-metre effort to win a meet in Chorzow, Poland, in June, demonstrating she is a podium threat at every competition she enters. Which has become routine.

In April 2018, Nettey won gold with a leap of 6.84 metres at the Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast, Australia, a couple of steps up the podium from the bronze she won at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland. Later in the season, Nettey claimed her sixth national title, and then went on to finish in seventh place in the Diamond League finale in Brussels.

Nettey won gold in front of family and friends at the Pan American Games in Toronto, nailing a 6.90-metre jump back in 2015. A memorable moment.

That was the year almost everything clicked for Nettey, who set the Canadian record of 6.99 metres, sticking a record jump at an indoor meet in Stockholm that February, then replicating the feat outdoors at the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene, Ore., in May.

Training under legendary U.S. track coach Dan Pfaff in Phoenix, Ariz., whose ALTIS club she had joined in 2014, Nettey found her long-jumping sweet spot that season and stayed there for most of the year, with just one hiccup.

That came at the 2015 IAAF World Championships in Beijing, China, when Nettey’s best leap was a solid 6.95 metres, just four centimetres off her Canadian record. But in a deep, talented World Championship field, it left Nettey in fourth place, six centimetres from the podium, a bittersweet result in an otherwise sparkling season.

Nettey’s 2016 season was marred by a nagging groin injury, which kept her out of the indoor season completely and hampered her performance on the outdoor circuit. Nonetheless, she earned a berth on the Canadian team at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. But an off-form Nettey did not qualify for the final in her event.

Nettey opened the 2017 season with a leap of 6.92 metres, a promising start. Once again, she produced solid results the rest of the season, consistently on or just off the podium, as has become her habit.

Gaining momentum on the road to Tokyo, Nettey is looking for a happier Olympic memory, compared to her injury-hampered trip to Rio.