Olympic Athlete Inika McPherson Lost Her Home in Hurricane Harvey

But it's making her stronger

Posted October 6, 2017

Inika Mcpherson prepares to compete in the women's high jump event at the 2017 IAAF World Championships in London

Photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images

The Olympic high jumper Inika McPherson can practically clear a six-foot bar in her sleep. But now she's staring down three feet of water. Like millions of others, the repeat world champion—who placed tenth at the 2016 Rio Olympics and just got back from Worlds in London—has been displaced by Hurricane Harvey. She was staying with her mother in Beaumont, Texas while training with her coach, whom she had followed to Arizona, then Memphis, and just this summer to Houston. "I already felt like I was starting over, now I'm really starting over," the 31-year-old told me, sitting on her bed in the Beaumont Lounge, which sounds like and is, "a roach motel," McPherson grins. "But, you know, it's something that I can be inside and be having a place that I can lay my head." She's without a car now, so she's waiting for her mom to come pick her up and take her to the track—not at an Olympic training center but a Catholic middle school inland that was relatively undamaged.