In celebration of the 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Paris, GLAMOUR has launched Change The Record, a series dedicated to the women of Team GB, who are flipping the narrative on what it means to be an elite female athlete, from competing on their periods, balancing training with pregnancy and motherhood, navigating body image pressures, and yes, chasing world records.
Here, we chat with Morgan Lake, Team GB's high jump competitor at this year's Olympics, about her experiences with body-shaming as an athlete, the gender pay gap and her experience at Paris 2024…
Morgan Lake knows a thing or two about resilience. The Team GB high jumper has competed on the athletics world stage since the age of just 17 – taking the inevitable (and literal) highs and lows in her stride along the way. In fact, it's the knockbacks that have made her hungrier for success than ever.
“There are times that I've looked back at my career and thought about missed opportunities, or I'll wonder how many medals I could have got by now,” she says when we speak over Zoom just weeks before Paris 2024. “But then, that's also the thing that keeps me in the sport and so hungry to achieve that.”
She is perhaps referencing her – in her own words – “heartbreaking” retirement from the high jump Olympic finals at Tokyo 2020, after sustaining a foot injury that forced her to withdraw, or her unexpected fourth finish at the World Athletics Indoor Championship in Glasgow in March, where she just missed a medal.
The Olympic canoeist bravely shares her experiences with depression and self harm.
“When that day does come and I do stand on a podium at a global final, it will feel so much sweeter,” she says, with quiet confidence. “It won't have just happened accidentally. As a kid, you can get a PB every week – or for me, getting junior medals and European junior medals – I probably didn't fully appreciate those moments. Whereas now… I mean, it's been 10 years since I was last on a global podium, which is a really long time. But I'm also like, okay, but I've learned so much in those 10 years – I can just kind put it towards motivation."
Sadly, those hopes of an Olympic medal weren't to be in Paris – Morgan finished a surprise 15th in her qualifying round, meaning she didn't progress to the high jump finals to compete for a podium. Ever positive, she soon shared her understandable heartbreak on Instagram, before looking ahead to the future.
“No Olympic final for me this time round,” she wrote. “I’m sorry to the people who have supported me all year and I’m so grateful to have made it to 3 Olympics. 10 years of back to back senior championships is something I can be proud of. Not been the season of dreams like last year, but at some point I’m sure it’ll all come back round again. A bit of time needed to reflect.”
Instagram content
But Olympic disappointment aside, there have been plenty of highs in Morgan Lake's career. In February last year, she broke the British indoor high jump record with an impressive 1.99 metres – beating celebrated heptathlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson's best of 1.98. But Morgan has been smashing athletic records since the age of just 12 – she broke the British under-13 pentathlon record back in 2009, and later secured the under-17 high jump record in 2013… and the under-20 high jump record in 2014.
At the 2016 Rio Olympics, when she was just 19, Lake became the first British woman to reach an Olympic high jump final since Debbie Marti in 1992. And in June, she secured her 13th British title at the 2024 UK Athletics Championships in Manchester.
From Simone Biles to Nada Hafez.
During our chat, Morgan was candid about how important it is to maintain her mental strength despite setbacks – working with a mindset coach to take the positives and fuel her in future.
“All the resilience and all the lessons I've learned on the track, I can use off the track as well,” she says. “I think it has grown me as a person as well. As hard as it is, it has made me the person that I am today.
“I've definitely learned not to always push myself,” she says of protecting her mental health. “These days, I realise that one day doesn't make much of a difference. I'd rather be in a good mental space than going too far on the track and coming home and just feeling upset. Sometimes, I do need a day off. I need a day to have a long bath and just relax. Not everything has to be super focused all the time. And that could just lead to burnout as well.”
Morgan speaks easily about maintaining her mindset, but I wonder if it has always been that way. She recalls one of the hardest moments in her early career, when a top coach in the sport made an unsolicited comment about her body.
"When I was 18, I moved over from heptathlon to high jump. The perception at the time was that high jumpers are ‘really lean’, and that was it… the narrative was, they're just thin and light and that's how they go over the bar. And being a heptathlete, you've got seven events to train for – you're training all the time. There wasn't much talk about my body then, because you've got so many events and you need to be able to jump and sprint.
"There were so many different body shapes and sizes in Heptathlon – whereas high jump was kind of a one size fits all. When I went to my first championship, one of the top coaches told me: 'you won't be a high jumper because you're too big'.”
“Whatever you're achieving, you've done, and your body is your body”
She adds: “Thinking back, it was such a big moment because I remember thinking, I'm here at a World Championship in high jump and I've already been told by the top coach that I'm not the right body shape for it. It really got to me.
"Luckily, I was with one of the other high jumpers at the time, who were older than me. I'm so glad she was there in that moment because she was just like, 'You can't listen to what one man is telling you about what you look like and how that's going to shape your life'. It was a really hard-hitting moment, but I'm just so glad that she was there to remind me: whatever you're achieving, you've done, and your body is your body. We had a really long chat about that.
"The sad thing is that I'm sure that must happen so much [to young athletes]. I was 18, so it was the most pivotal time when you're just becoming an adult and a bit more aware of those things.
“I carried on doing Heptathlon for a few years after that, and I do wonder if things would have been different if he hadn't made that comment – because there were so many years when I didn't feel like a high jumper. It was the first time I became aware that other people had opinions of what I looked like, which was definitely a moment for me.”
Unfortunately, it seems that female athletes are still under pressure to conform to a certain body type – whether it's under the guise of sporting performance or not.
“I still hear it's mostly men who comment,” Morgan says. “I don't ever hear women comment on other people's bodies – very, very rarely. It's mostly men being like, 'Oh, she's too big to jump high', or she's too… whatever to be whatever event it is. It's so sad. There's been so much talk in female spaces on body image and getting our self-esteem higher with body positivity, but with men, maybe that conversation hasn't transcended – especially in sport. Sadly I don't think anything has really changed.”
She reflects that when it comes to women's bodies and sport, she's also encouraged that there's increasing awareness around periods – as more and more female athletes speak out about the impact of their cycles on their performance and wellbeing. Fellow sportswomen, including long jumper Jazmin Sawyer and triathlete Emma Pallant-Brown, have recently shared their experiences with competing on their periods, and Morgan has similar sentiments.
“Your body just changes so much and different times of the month. Sometimes, I do look back at my competitions and think, wow, I was so bloated. And then my period comes. Or some days, I'm like, why am I having such a bad day… why am I not firing, and why has my strength gone down? And I can't figure it out. Then I look at my cycle, and it makes sense," she says. “I've had to educate myself in that since it's not something that we were ever taught about. That's one thing that's definitely changing. I think a lot of younger athletes now seem to understand it more, which is really good,” she says.
The Lioness pens an exclusive essay for GLAMOUR.
One area where there's more to be done is when it comes to equal pay for female athletes, Morgan shares. “It's definitely an ongoing conversation. It's really nice that the prize money [for athletics] is exactly the same for men and women, which is a huge thing,” she says. “But behind the scenes, male contracts are usually a lot higher than female contracts. Obviously, that's not publicly shown, so I guess it's something that's easier to hide.
“But generally, I do feel like athletics is quite an equal sport in terms of opportunities and in the way it's marketed and the schedule for men's and women's events," she is quick to add. “So I feel really fortunate to be in athletics because of that – I think it might have even been one of the reasons why I chose the sport when I was younger. It always felt like more of a level playing field. It's probably one of the reasons why I love the sport so much.”
“Behind the scenes, male contracts are usually a lot higher than female contracts”
As for winding down outside of athletics, Morgan is partial to hot yoga – the UK-wide franchise Hotpod Yoga, in particular – for its wellness benefits, rather than fitness ones. “I've done other yoga before, where it just feels like another training session or doesn't really feel like me switching off,” she says. "But being in a hot pod with the mood lighting, the really calm music and atmosphere… it's my favourite place to just kind of switch off and move my body really gently, but just completely turn off my thoughts. I don't get distracted by my phone or anything. It's that hour I give to myself to just chill.”
Quietly driven, you can guarantee that Morgan will take her latest setback in her stride. As our time comes to an end, I ask her how it feels to cope with the nation's expectations. “I think my biggest coping mechanism is just kind of… not thinking about everyone else," she admits.
"What will be will be. I know that at every single competition, it's the same track – it's the same competitors competing. I have to remind myself that nothing has changed – it’s just the expectations. My high jumping doesn't have to change because of that. And I can use people's expectations as motivation as well. It's like, wow, people actually believe I can do this. So if they've got that belief, then I should have that belief myself as well.”
And hey, belief is a powerful thing. She'll be back.
“Gonna hold your hand when I say this…”
