Beneath a grey sky, on a red runway, comes a blur of yellow spikes. Kampton Kam is in the take-off business. His father, a Singapore Airlines pilot, requires roughly 2,000-3,000m of runway for his Boeing 777, but the son requires only three steps and eight strides to get airborne.

The high jump seems like a type of haiku, a compressed athletic poetry that lasts a few seconds, but in fact it's a technical exercise involving velocity, angle, curve, arch, centre of gravity. And Kam needs every skill he can muster to get over the bar because he feels he's not entirely physically suited to leap that bar.