How Hong Kong long jumper Tiffany Yue will leap to the Paris Olympics: match her personal best 3 times in the coming weeks
- The Asian Games bronze medallist is aiming to become the first woman from Hong Kong to compete in the long jump
- The 26-year-old will hope to at least match her best distance at the Hong Kong championships next week and events in Europe
Tiffany Yue Nga-yan knows exactly what she needs to do to become the first woman to represent Hong Kong at the Olympics in the long jump – and it will mean matching her personal best at least three times over the next several weeks.
As the 26-year-old enters the final stretch of a crucial qualifying campaign for the Summer Games in Paris later this year, her focus is entirely on breaking into the top 32 in the world.
Fortunately, Yue is not that far removed from the 6.50 metres with which she managed to win bronze at the Asian Games, a distance that, if repeated, should help her make history.
Yue, who has been training in London for the past five months, arrived back in the city on Wednesday and will compete in the Hong Kong Athletics Championships on May 4 and 5.
“It’s special to be at home and be competing in Hong Kong again; I’m really looking forward to the championships,” Yue said.
National Olympic Committees (NOCs) can send three athletes inside the world’s top 32 to the Paris Olympics. Taking into account the three-per-country rule, Yue is ranked 43rd.
World rankings are based on the average of the best five jumps over the qualifying period and weighted by the importance of the event.
Male and female athletes who jump 8.27m and 6.86m, respectively, but are not in the top 32 can also qualify.
After competing in Hong Kong, Yue will head to tournaments in Europe and said if she could pull three 6.50 metre jumps out of the bag, she should make it to Paris in July.
“I’ll have to have about two or three more competitions where I’m jumping at 6.50 metres or above, and then I guess it’s pretty secure,” she said.
Hong Kong is not known for its track and field prowess, and only Chu Ming, at the 1964 Games in Tokyo, and Chan Ming-tai in 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, have represented the city in long jump.
Yue has been progressing throughout the year; in January she jumped 6.35m at the World Athletics Indoor Tour in Kazakhstan, before leaping 6.45m into the sandpit at the Asian Indoor Athletics Championships in Iran in February.
Both were World Athletics category A events.
Yue said one reason for the improvement was spending the past five months with coach Anny Chan in London.
“It makes quite a good base for us because there’s an indoor track, an outdoor track and the gym all together in one place,” she said. “Currently, we are working on the run-up and take-off [and] there are a lot of different drills for us to do to fix my problems.”
Chan and Yue had been together since she started competing in long jump in 2014 right up until 2022, when Chan moved to London and Swede Rolf Ohman stepped in for a year.
“First off, the performance wasn’t there … [and] the training method wasn’t really a match for me,” Yue said of her time with Ohman.
Yue and Chan were reunited in May 2023, just four months before her medal-winning performance in Hangzhou.
The reason the pair work so well together is Chan’s tailor-made training schedule and clear communication about what their expectations are.
“The special part is her trying to tailor-make everything for me,” Yue said.
“And that’s pretty much the main point, because she needs to know how I’m feeling about training and I need to know what she wants me to achieve.
“So the whole communication part is really very crucial to us.”
