Brill Is Back : High Jumper Proving She Can Have It All--or Most of It

Debbie Brill is a world-class high jumper who seems to have both feet on the ground.

At 31, and in her 17th year of competitive athletics, Brill views her sport as an expression of creativity and self-fulfillment rather than a life-and-death matter of winning or losing.

She is also a working mother whose support of her 3-year-old son, Neil, depends at least partly on her high-jumping success and continued ability to generate appearance fees and en dorsement contracts.

Brill will be at work in the Times/Kodak Indoor Games Friday night at the Forum. She is the Canadian record-holder both outdoors, with a jump of 6 feet 6 inches, and indoors, with one of 6-6. She registered her indoor mark at Edmonton in January of 1982, only five months after Neil’s birth, and it was a world-record at the time.

“My first thought was, ‘Boy, I’m going to have another kid.’ Unfortunately, it (her come back) wasn’t as easy as it appeared. I should have taken more time before I started jumping again. I should have taken it easier. But there was nothing to read, nothing for a new mother with athletic interest to go on then.

“Jumping is a very jarring sport and I hadn’t really regained my muscle strength. I hadn’t given the tendons that stretch out during childbirth time to recover. I set a world record, then fell apart.”

She tore knee and Achilles tendons and needed two years to come back from those injuries. She made it last summer, jumping 6-6 in September for a Canadian outdoor record. Now her sights are on the 6-8 world indoor record of the Soviet Union’s Tamara Bykova and the 6-9 1/2 world outdoor record of Bulgaria’s Lyudmila Andonova. Seven feet? Not impossible either.

“I’m jumping better than I was before I got hurt,” Brill said. “A few people have gone higher the last few years, but no one is jumping any better on a consistent basis. I’m jumping as well as anyone anywhere.”

Brill would liked to have demonstrated that in last summer’s Los Angeles Olympics but strained an ankle tendon during qualifying and finished fifth.

“I was disappointed,” she said. “But then a day later I was OK, and I felt good about that. I had been bound up in myself for so long that it felt good to be able to put things in perspective, to be able to step back and realize that the chance to compete in an Olympics was an accomplishment in itself.”

That is part of the philosophy that began to evolve when Brill quit jumping for two years after finishing eighth in the 1972 Munich Olympics.

“I was brought up on a farm in Vancouver,” she said. “I started competing when I was 14. It came easy for me. I never had to work that hard at it then. I was so good so young that it was difficult for me to deal with the continual pressure and attention. I never enjoyed that part of it, never went out and pursued it. It really began to build for me and I couldn’t reconcile myself to a winning-above-all attitude. I was seeing only the unhealthy side of it, but it took me awhile to realize that.”

The realization brought her back to the arena, but her philosophy was more deeply ingrained.

“I’m a really good high jumper,” Brill said. “I’m a really good athlete. I feel I can go out and play anything. I love to compete. I love to win. That gives me an extra amount of psych, an extra amount of adrenaline. I recognize that, but I don’t ever want it to be my focus, my goal.

“Winning isn’t my goal. My goal is my growth, my development, my understanding of how I handle pressure. I can’t believe how many athletes are caught up in the winning and losing, caught up in thinking it’s their paycheck. My goal was to reach a point where I loved the sport strictly for the competition, where it wasn’t life and death. I’ve reached that point now.

“I can walk into a stadium full of people and feel at home. My jumping is an art form I can keep working at and making better, a chance for creativity and self expression. I feel good about myself physically and mentally. I feel good about my life, period.”

If the philosophy is that of the amateur, Brill recognizes the realities of her world. The appearance fees, she said, can sustain her only from meet to meet. Adidas, the shoe company, has dropped its sponsorship of Canadian athletes, costing Brill her financial edge. She lives on a houseboat in Vancouver and attempts to stay with friends while on the road.

She and Neil are guests here of U.S. javelin thrower Kate Schmidt. Brill and her son’s father, Vancouver rock musician Greg Ray, do not live together but share in their child’s upbringing. Brill said that Neil will spend half the year with her, half with his father.

Her uncertain financial outlook has not dimmed Brill’s enthusiasm for jumping as a competitive and creative outlet. She laughed and said she hopes to continue perfecting a style known as the Brill Bend, her answer to the Fosbury Flop.

“I remember how they tried to ban it at first,” Brill said. “They said it was illegal, that I couldn’t put my neck over the bar first because I’d break it. They used to tell me, ‘If you ever learn how to jump, you’ll be terrific.’

“My techniques took a dive during the time I was injured but I feel now I’ve got it together again. I’d like to have more children but not until my career is over, and right now I feel that I’d love to still be jumping when I was 60. I love to feel this fit, to have this sense of no (physical) restraint.”

Brill said that during her career, she had seen a significant change in attitude toward women in athletics. “There’s a better understanding and acceptance of it now,” she said. “I came out of high school and people said, ‘Aren’t you going to quit now? Aren’t you going to go to work? Aren’t you going to injure your reproduction system if you continue to compete?’

“I’d like to think I’ve helped change the thinking on all counts.”