Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

Christian athlete Nicola Olyslagers has continued her strong season by winning the 2025 Wanda Diamond League Final—once again pointing to God as the source of her inspiration.

Last week, I published an article on how Aussie athlete Nicola Olyslagers’s Christian faith motivates her to press through adversity. Her story is a powerful witness to the resilience and courage her Christian faith inspires. 

I encourage you to read that piece if you have not yet.

This weekend at the 2025 Wanda Diamond League Final, Nicola soared to new heights—beating her own Australian and Oceania records, clearing the highest mark of any athlete this year (2.04 metres), and outperforming the current world-record holder, Ukraine’s Yaroslava Mahuchikh. 

This is a significant achievement following a series of Diamond League wins (in Stockholm, Paris, and Lausanne), with the twenty-eight-year-old becoming just the third Australian woman to hold the prestigious Diamond League title.

It also represents at least the fifth time the Olympian and high-jumper has improved on her own national and continental records, since she originally beat both records back in April 2021 (she was the first Australian woman to clear 2 metres).

Olyslagers is set to compete in the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo in the next two weeks.

Faith-Infused Sport

But for Olyslagers, these milestones are not the whole story.

While the athlete takes every opportunity she can to direct glory to God, the mainstream media’s coverage of her performance on the weekend rarely mentions how central it is to her life.

Reflecting on her win, Olyslagers said that for her, it all came back to surrendering her sport to God: 

“It’s very special. I didn’t ever imagine when I was a child that I would get to this height. I look back to when I was 20 years old, when I decided to take off control of my sport and just put it into the hands of God. I’ve just seen that when I play, there’s something beautiful that comes out every time.”

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by STRAIGHT AT IT | AUSTRALIAN TRACK & FIELD MEDIA (@straightatit_)

In contrast to most mainstream coverage, one piece published in The Australian by sports reporter Will Stanton gets a little more at the heart of the weekend news—from Nicola’s perspective. Stanton describes her as an “emotional and entertaining” athlete with “a spring in her step” who “wears her heart on [her] sleeve during competition”. 

But behind doors, says Stanton, Nicola is “getting by with a little help from a friend. God.”

He then asks the question: is God part of the reason Olyslagers is performing so well? The answer is not straightforward. He rightly identifies that God, by His nature, is probably not particularly concerned with athletic results—He is likely not directly intervening to give Christian sportsmen and women an edge over their opponents.

And yet, Stanton suggests that it is not absurd to think that Christian faith actually does help. He suggests that this extra help might come through freeing a person to live to their potential, to be the best person they can be:

“That’s the victory we’re all chasing in life, right? To be our highest self, to realise our potential as people, as employees, as writers, as editors, as school teachers, as world-class high jumpers or everyday humans. I’m quite sure that is where Olyslagers is coming from.”

While I would probably word things slightly differently, there seems to be a lot of truth in Stanton’s words. When we surrender our lives to God, we are freed from the cares that can so easily cripple us and can live fully for His glory.

Win or lose, this is as true for sports as it is for any other vocation.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Nicola Olyslagers (@nicolalmcdermott)