The story of Aleksandra Mirosław begins at home, before the records and before the Olympic gold she won in Paris 2024 in speed climbing. In Lublin, Poland, while she was still a child, she used to watch her older sister, Gosia, come back from competitions with medals and trophies. That is how she explains that first impulse herself: “My older sister started in 2005 and in almost every competition she won a medal or a trophy. I looked at her and I wanted to be like her.” In her memory, there is no rivalry, but something simpler: “It wasn’t jealousy or competition between sisters; it was more that feeling of looking at your older sister and thinking that was the way you were supposed to live.”

Before fully committing to climbing, her path was not yet decided. She has said that she stopped swimming and that her parents encouraged her to look for another passion. She chose the wall out of closeness and admiration. “Because I admired my sister so much, I chose climbing,” she recalled. She also described a city very different from the one that now recognises her as an Olympic champion: at that time, she explained, there were only three climbing walls in Lublin, one of them at her school and another at a fire station that was closed to the public.

The first international gold came almost by accident

One of the most revealing episodes in her profile came very early, and almost by chance. Mirosław said that in 2009 she had not officially qualified for the World Youth Championship because of a false start at the Polish Championship. Even so, her coach insisted that she should travel and asked her parents to cover the cost. She went to France without the usual path of a selected athlete and came back with the title. She still tells the story with a degree of disbelief: “I won. It was surreal for me because it was my first or second international competition, the only medal for Poland, and I wasn’t supposed to be there.”

What matters most in that memory is not only the victory, but the way she keeps it. Mirosław explained that the journey from Poland to Valence was made by road and that, after the competition, she fell asleep in the car. When she woke up in the middle of the night, she checked that the trophy and the medal were still there. “I thought I was going to the competition, not coming back from it,” she said.

Olympic pressure changed the way she competed

Over the years, climbing stopped being just a sport chosen out of enthusiasm. Mirosław explains that the arrival of the sport in the Olympic programme changed her career and also the environment around her. “Everything changed. Everything,” she said, looking back on that process. Until then, by her own account, she competed because she liked training and because competing brought her joy. Then sponsors arrived, expectations grew, and the way she looked at preparation changed. “Now it’s serious,” she said. She also explained that until around 2018 she combined training with a full-time job.

That change in scale had a particularly difficult point in 2023, when she missed her first chance in Bern to secure an Olympic place for Paris. Mirosław said that defeat forced her to face a feeling she had never known before. “It was the first time in my life that I felt anxiety,” she said. What surprised her most was not only the defeat itself, but the emptiness that came after it, the inability to react in the way she expected. From that period, she draws one very clear conclusion: “It helped me understand that I’m not a machine. I’m human.” In her account, that moment does not appear as a definitive break, but as the point from which she began to reorganise her mind and the way she competed.

Mateusz, Lublin and life away from the wall

A central figure in that journey is Mateusz Mirosław, her husband and coach. Aleksandra began working with him in 2014, when she felt she had stopped growing. When she speaks about that relationship, she avoids abstract formulas and prefers concrete situations. “You can’t fully separate the roles; he is my coach and my husband at the same time,” she explained. She also said that sometimes a single look is enough for them to understand each other, as happened at a World Championship in Seoul, when he noticed that she was uncomfortable with a television camera being too close before competition and went to speak to the organisers.

Away from the circuit, her image has also become part of her city. After her victory in Paris, Reuters reported that there was already a life-size mural of her in Lublin, but it had to be updated after she lowered her record again. The artist, Michał Ćwiek, described her as “a girl from my city”, a way of bringing her back to a recognisable place of origin after the Olympic spotlight.