I mean Bolt, that was an obvious thing for Bolt to do and he didn’t feel the desire to go and try to do it.” So a lot of athletes don’t even go and try and do it. “Since stopped jumping, it’s really fallen down compared to other events, 100 meters, 1500, pole vault, stuff like that,” Powell says. Today, very few professional athletes double up in the sprints and the long jump, and Powell believes that many of the athletes with the sprint speed to become a world-class long jumper become sprinters instead, where there is more money and fame available than in the jumps. In his prime, Lewis wasn’t just the world’s greatest long jumper, but the greatest sprinter too, winning back-to-back Olympic 100-meter titles in 19. “When Carl was jumping, Carl made the long jump glamorous and so we had a lot of athletes going into the long jump,” Powell says.īut Powell goes further: he believes that even within track & field, the long jump is not getting the top athletes. Powell, who idolized Carl Lewis as a teenager in the early 1980s, agrees. So we’re not necessarily getting the same level of talent that maybe was going on in the ’90s.”Ģ-time NCAA long jump champ Marquise Goodwin ![]() “They’re playing football, they’re playing basketball. “The best athletes are playing the big (team) sports,” says Nic Petersen, the renowned jumps coach at the University of Florida. One theory is that the freak athletes like Beamon and Powell are no longer finding their way to the long jump. Six of the top seven men on the all-time long jump list are American, but only one of those athletes, Dwight Phillips, has set his PR since the turn of the century. 1) The long jump doesn’t get the best athletes anymore So what explains the world record drought? Let’s examine some of the most popular theories. Powell’s 8.95 is the fourth-oldest men’s world record on the books the other three are all in the throws, two of which are very questionable (shot put world record holder Randy Barnes was banned for life for using performance-enhancing drugs discus world record holder Jürgen Schult competed for East Germany, which operated a state-run doping regime). Only two men - Echevarria and Luvo Manyonga of South Africa - have come within a foot of Beamon’s 8.90 this decade. ![]() The four longest jumpers in history are the same now as they were in 1991, and of the 10 longest jumpers in history, only one - #10 Juan Miguel Echevarria of Cuba - has set his PR since 2009. ![]() You see, the long jump is in something of a rough patch. Powell’s world record has now stood four years longer than Beamon’s - it’s up to 27 years and counting - and has not been challenged for decades.
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