EJ OBIENA closed out his pre-Olympic sortie with a fourth-place finish at the Wanda Diamond League Stockholm leg on Sunday.
But for Obiena, there’s nothing much to worry about.
“He’s tired and wasn’t 100 percent, but he [Obiena] managed to jump consistently at the 5.80-meter mark,” his dad, Emerson, told BusinessMirror on Monday. “That means there’s still a lot of hope for EJ to go beyond 5.90m at the Olympics.”
The elder Obiena knows his soup being a former pole vaulter himself with a Chiang Mai 1995 Southeast Asian Games silver medal displayed prominently at their home in Tondo.
Obiena managed 5.82m and finished outside of the podium of the event world record holder Armand Duplantis won with a leap of 6.02 meters.
The US’s Sam Kendricks booked 5.92m for the silver and so did Renaud Lavillenie, but the Frenchman was relegated to the bronze medal.
Obiena toured Europe during pandemic year 2020 joining various competitions and hiked his pre-Games tuneup he highlighted with a gold medal at the Taby Stav Gala Street Pole Vault Competition also in Stockholm with a 5.80-m performance.
Obiena has yet to break the 6.0m ceiling but his father said his son is under no pressure because of his consistency in his previous tournaments.
“We are hopeful that he can breach 5.90m, which is our target,” Emerson Obiena said. “We have a greater chance if our batting average is high.”
“Pole vaulting is unpredictable, anything can happen,” he said. Obiena returned to Formia, Italy, to wrap up his last phase of training under coach Vitaly Petrov. He will fly to the Tokyo Olympics on July 23.
The pole vault competitions in Tokyo start on July 31 at the National Stadium.
Obiena cleared 5.70m at the Folksam Grand Prix in Sweden last June 3 but still won gold, beating Rio Olympics gold medalist Thiago Braz da Silva (5.6m) and third placer Norway’s Paul Haugen Lillefosse (5.60-m) Obiena tallied a total of five golds, four silvers and three bronzes in his European sojourn.
Duplantis tried to reset his 6.18m world record on Sunday, but failed in three attempts.