For most of this year, long jumper Liam Adcock was living the kind of season that most athletes can only dream about. After years of injury cycles, interruptions and quiet doubts, 2025 began with a feeling he hadn’t had in a long time – everything was finally moving in the right direction.
His body held through injury, his training clicked. The jumps came early and came clean. Doors that had been shut for years, including Diamond League call ups, finally opened.
But even as the results rolled in, something else stayed close behind him. Pressure, self critique and the feeling that one slip might undo everything.
“I suppose it was pretty early in the season,” he says of his World Indoor Championships medal. “It was really validating, stepping up to a new level.”
But the validation didn’t quiet the noise, it only raised the bar.
“After I’d gone two or three comps in a row over my previous PB, I felt like that was my new norm.”
That “new norm” was both a breakthrough and a burden. Each big jump meant the next one had to be bigger. Each high tightened the pressure around him.
Still, Adcock kept rising, and then almost suddenly, everything turned.
By the time he reached Tokyo for the World Athletics Championships, he wasn’t just a contender on paper, he felt like one.
“My body felt good, and I felt like I was ready to do some damage.”
Then in minutes and in a handful of attempts, the momentum of an entire year felt like it slipped through his hands.
Technical adjustments he couldn’t settle, a runway that felt foreign and timing he couldn’t recover. Adcock didn’t make the final.
It was the lowest moment of his season, arriving just weeks after some of the highest. That closeness shook him more than the result itself.
“As a younger athlete, your identity is tied to your results. If you perform poorly, you just feel like a bad person, or useless.”
That instinct, even as he has gotten older, hasn’t left him. The emotional drop from being one of the best in the world to feeling like he had failed himself was steep and fast.
Off the track, the weight was no lighter. The financial instability of being a track and field athlete, a knee scare in Europe, and the pressure of sustaining form while life around him remained unpredictable.
“I’m not very good at resetting after big things happen but I’m trying.”
That honesty sits at the heart of Movember, acknowledging the parts of yourself that you’re still trying to figure out.
“It’s getting to a point where you realise you can’t do everything by yourself. Other people’s input, even non-professionals, can give you a different perspective,” he said.
“Strength is being aware of your own shortcomings and being able to ask for help when you know you need it.”
His definition of success has also shifted, not because he no longer has the hunger for world medals, but because tying his self worth has not worked for him.
It’s a lesson earned a hard way, learning that joy isn’t only available in the highs and and self-worth can’t be built on results alone.
“After Perth Track Classic and three PBs in a row, I was like ‘Okay, I’m one of the best in the world now. That’s funny!”
A situation that has shown him he can rise fast, fall fast and still get back up.
“I guess, why not me?”
By Sascha Ryner, Australian Athletics
Posted: 28/11/2025
