Jonathan Edwards and the surrealness of holding a world record for 30 years

New York Times

4 hours ago

On August 7, at the 1995 World Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden, Jonathan Edwards produced the two greatest triple jumps the world had seen, one after the other.
In an enthralling 20 minutes of track and field history, he became the first man to jump beyond 18 meters, and the first to go 60 feet.
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When recalling that day, the way the Englishman easily switches between present and past tenses highlights how vivid his memories are, even three decades on. 'It's neither recent nor far away,' the 59-year-old tells The Athletic when asked if, as the cliche goes, it 'feels like yesterday.'
'It's just something completely separate, almost completely other. I mean, it's so far removed from my life now, the thought of jumping that far, being an international athlete, breaking a world record… it is surreal.'
Edwards, then 29 years old, jumped his first world record of the day — quite possibly the shortest-lived world record in any sport — with his first-round mark of 18.16m.
He held his arms aloft and, as he ran away from the sandpit, punched the air and jumped for joy. History had been made and his first global title was all but secured. And then came the second round, when he went even further.
'That was surreal, to land in the pit and think, 'I've broken the world record again,'' he says. The phases of his 18.29m jump break down into 6.05m for the hop, a 5.22m step, and an incredible 7.02m jump.
'There was a huge sense of relief when I landed and knew it was huge in the first round. That was phenomenal. But it was quite a different me in the second round. I was much more relaxed, the pressure has gone to a degree, but I'm still very motivated to jump far.'
Winning bronze at the 1993 World Championships in Stuttgart, Germany, with a 17.44m jump gave him, he says, the belief that he could win a world title, even jump close to 18m and 'challenge the world record,' which at the time was 17.97m, set by American Willie Banks in 1985.
His doubt and lack of self-conviction up until that point had stemmed from his unremarkable performances as a junior.
'My development was so slow. I was a late developer, and I didn't really train seriously until I left university. It took a while to get going and really appreciate the level of commitment and dedication that it required to make the most of my talent,' he says.
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'When I was 19, the world junior (under-20) record was 17.50m. My best jump was 15m. I always lagged a long way behind, and certainly on a global level. There's nothing there that says, 'This guy's gonna break the world record!' I feel incredibly lucky. There are so many points in that journey where I might not have even become an athlete.'
And yet, he is one of the few athletes not just to win the full set, but to be Olympic, world, Commonwealth and continental (European) champion at the same time, holding all titles briefly in 2002.
After his second jump in Gothenburg, cameras swarmed Edwards. But there was a problem: The competition still had four rounds left and Bermudan Brian Wellman, the eventual silver medalist, was next up. Edwards had to plead with the photographers and TV crews to clear the runway.
'He was saying, 'My jumps were messed up twice by you breaking the world record, all the hullabaloo,'' Edwards laughs. 'Suddenly, it's not a 30-second wait to jump, it's a three-and-a-half-minute wait.
'There are camera people, they don't care. I've won the thing, got the world record, 'Who (in the media) cares who came second?' type thing. He (Wellman) cares a lot! I was very aware of that and tried to get them out of the way.'
Edwards knew his second-round jump was better than his first. 'The only thing I didn't know was what the exact distance was, but I was aware when 18.29m came up that it was over 60 feet — and that was a big deal. To break 18m and 60 feet on the same day was quite something,' he says.
Technically, he says, very little changed between his first two jumps.
'The only thing during the jump that was very, very noticeable was this moment during the step phase. I just had to pause before the final phase, just that fraction of a second when I knew it was better and I was flying a bit further.'
In some physical aspects, triple jump is the most extreme of all track and field events. Off a maximum 45-metre run-up, athletes experience ground reaction forces of up to 22 times their bodyweight across the three phases, according to a 1993 study published in the Journal of Biomechanics.
Edwards' two jumps showcased his perfected 18-step run-up and immense runway speed, and he executed the double-arm pump that he had trained in the 1994-95 offseason.
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'It gave me balance,' he explains. The purpose was to maximise runway speed, his super-strength.
After both arms naturally swung forward during the step phase (after the hop), he would pull them back as his right foot landed. The arms were then launched forwards and up as he jumped into the pit.
The detail of this, along with his position on the board, was one of the things he asked his coach about after his first jump.
'That's what proved to be the difficult thing. But when I got it right — and even in Gothenburg it wasn't absolutely perfect compared to Lille, but it was still very, very good.'
Lille is where he performed his greatest jump, what he describes as the 'single most remarkable day of my athletics career.' There, he jumped the world record that never was.
In northern France, six weeks before the World Championships, Edwards jumped 18.43m but a tailwind of 2.4 metres per second was marginally over the 2m/s legal limit for a record. Such was his runway speed, he took off before reaching the board.
'That was the big breakthrough,' Edwards says of his 18.43m in Lille. 'Once I did that, then everybody knew — and I knew — I could break the world record. Before Lille, I was a 17.50m jumper and then, suddenly, I jumped (close to) 18.50m.
'It was just such a ridiculously long way. All the competitors were looking at me as if to say, 'What have you just done?' There was a shock seeing 18.43m come up. It wasn't a triple jump distance.
'The timing, the balance, the whole thing was just perfect. A very different jump from Gothenburg. In Gothenburg, I didn't hop and step nearly as far, but I carried through such speed (from the runway) that I had this massive jump phase at the end.
'If you put together (the best phases from) those two jumps, you end up with something over 19 metres.'
That is definitely not, to use his words, a triple jump distance.
Edwards won all 14 meets he contested in 1995, accounting for the six best performances that calendar year (when results are listed by the single-best mark at each competition). He exceeded 18m at five different meets under all conditions and first broke the world record that year in Salamanca, Spain, three weeks before the World Championships (17.98m).
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By the time he arrived in Sweden, the media spotlight on him was bright enough that he bought a pair of sunglasses at the airport 'just to hide my eyes, so that all my competitors wouldn't see how scared I was.'
'The overall context is one of feeling that if I didn't jump well in the World Championships, the year was a failure, even though I'd already broken the world record. I wasn't used to the expectation and the pressure,' he says.
'Triple jump is a very technical event. There's a lot that can go wrong. I'd been in great shape in major championships before: Barcelona (1992 Olympics), for example, where I didn't even make the final, even though I went on to win the World Cup later that year in Havana. There's always the question mark. It might not all come together.'
What made the difference, Edwards explains, was how the first-round jump at the World Championships extinguished his nerves.
'I was every bit as motivated as I was in the first round, but relaxed. There's a little smile on my face. If I could have competed more like that, it would have been much less stressful, but I was always one to be very nervous. I got very uptight.
'Even into my latter years, when I'd sort of achieved everything and I was getting towards retiring, I still went into competitions with this fear of not winning, fear of failing.'
In the perennial records-versus-medals debate, Edwards does some mythbusting: 'One thing that people don't know is that you get a plaque for breaking the world record! I didn't realise that either. I got two for that day, I have something that says I broke the world record — nobody's going to come and take that from me.'
He is one of five different male field athletes with a world record that dates back to the 20th century. Edwards promptly recalls the others: Mike Powell (long jump, 8.95m, 1991), Jan Železný (javelin, 98.48m, 1996), Javier Sotomayor (high jump, 2.45m, 1993) and Yuriy Sedykh (hammer throw, 86.74m, 1986)
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How does he feel about the record lasting this long?
'I'm very surprised it hasn't been broken. I thought I would break it, initially, during the rest of my career.' The reason he did not, Edwards says, is an inability to execute the double-arm pump when he needed it.
'I was probably faster and stronger in subsequent years, but never had the technical capability to maximise it.'
In 2015, American Christian Taylor jumped a wind-legal 18.21m, eight centimeters off Edwards' record and the second-longest jump all-time. That year, Pedro Pichardo (Cuba-born, he now jumps for Portugal) also broke 18m.
Seven men have gone beyond 18m in the last 30 years, but the jump that has bothered Edwards the most was Jordan Díaz Fortún's gold-medal winning 18.18m at the European Championships last summer.
The triple jump at Stadio Olimpico in Rome was contested on a runway constructed next to the stands. It had plywood underneath, which Edwards says made it 'a trampoline. That was ridiculous. If he had broken my world record there and they had ratified it, I would not have been happy — just a nonsense.'
It is how the record goes he cares about most, not the when or if.
'The way everything is developed within the sport, how it is professionalised in every area, records should be broken — if there was the equivalent talent going into it, just through natural evolution. Ultimately, you have to say it is a failure from the sport.
'There's a bit of me that continually has to pinch myself that I broke the world record and that it's lasted this long.'
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