From the broad smile on the runway to a landing so immaculate you might think it was AI-generated – has British sport ever produced a moment quite so perfect?
From the broad smile on the runway to a landing so immaculate you might think it was AI-generated – has British sport ever produced a moment quite so perfect?
Described by one observer as “like watching a pebble being skimmed across a lake”, it is 30 years to the day since Jonathan Edwards combined speed, grace and power so majestically to hop, step and jump his way to athletics immortality.
A world-record leap of 18.29 metres has sailed deep into another century and ensures that Britain does still have one name in the athletics history books. It is also one of the sport’s longest-standing world records.
To put it into perspective, Bob Beaman’s ‘unbeatable’ world long-jump record survived four fewer years and, for all the advances in tracks, spikes and training methods, Edwards’s standard has seldom since been neared.
“There’s always been a sense of, ‘I can’t quite believe it happened to me’,” says Edwards who, it seems impossible to believe, will turn 60 next year. “A lot of my competitors would look at me and go, ‘If this skinny guy can do it, surely I can’. You grow up seeing heroes and feel very ordinary. So when you do something extraordinary it’s hard to equate the two. To choose something to do in life, and to have done it better than anybody ever, is a bit mind-blowing. Thirty years is nuts.”
And how did it feel? “Like you’re flying – it’s a rhythmic thing – almost like it’s someone else from the old stiff, achy man I am now,” says Edwards who, over a coffee last month at The Telegraph’s offices, relived an achievement that was both life-changing personally and game-changing for his event.
The setup
To understand the boyish grin that Edwards was displaying on the runway inside the Ullevi stadium in Gothenburg, you first need to know something of what had gone before.
The son of an Anglican vicar in Devon, the then physics graduate from the University of Durham was a late developer but had stuck at athletics when it made little financial sense to. It came out of a belief that he should not waste his God-given talent.
“That was my fundamental driver,” says Edwards, whose story had hitherto drawn attention not because of gold-medal heroics but a Chariots Of Fire-like decision to miss any event that required competing on a Sunday. Edwards also met his wife, Alison, through church. With his father’s encouragement, he persisted with athletics through periods receiving unemployment benefit and then working part-time in a hospital to a breakthrough of sorts in 1993 when he won World Championship bronze. Illness and overtraining, however, curtailed 1994 and he entered his annus mirabilis in 1995 – aged 29 – wondering if, now with two young children, it was time to redirect his focus.
“We had a newborn who wasn’t sleeping … there was a real sense of wondering whether my career was over,” he says. A lighter training programme combined with a technical tweak and weight-training sessions overseen by the Gateshead powerlifter Norman Anderson, however, would prove transformational.
Edwards produced a British-record 17.58m on June 11 before an extraordinary sequence over the next six weeks in which he lept 17.72m, 17.74m, a world-record 17.98m and, most jaw-droppingly of all, a wind-assisted 18.43m. ITV athletics had become so confident of incoming world records that Jim Rosenthal had taken to introducing their coverage next to the sandpit but, such was the expectation, Edwards recalls buying sunglasses en route to Gothenburg so that he could disguise an inner terror.
“I was petrified – I felt my season would be a failure if I didn’t win the World Championship,” he says. Yet that fear would simply evaporate after a world-record 18.16m in the first round of the final. “BANG!” exclaimed Steve Ovett, who was commentating for World Athletics.
As he approached the second round only 15 minutes later – and the jump for which he will be forever remembered – Edwards had entered a unique mental space. The adrenalin was still flowing from what had only just happened but, with the entire stadium behind him, was being combined with a torrent of relief.
“Here was the one moment where the pressure was off but the motivation necessary to jump a long way was still there,” he now says. “It was incredibly special and a feeling I never had again. The mindset was, ‘Just go for it’.”
The approach
Upon rewatching the run-up, the first noticeable aspect is Edwards’s raw speed. With a personal best over 100m of 10.40sec, he was fast for a triple jumper but his pace actually became world class if you shortened the distance to 40 metres.
“My top speed was the same as Donovan Bailey’s [the 1995 world and 1996 Olympic 100m champion] and a lot of training was based out of blocks,” he says. The runway was 35 metres, which equated to 18 strides, and there would be no looking down at the point of take off. “As soon as you start to look down, you are going to change your body position,” he says. “I would run as hard as I could and the board just happened to be underneath my foot when I took off.”
On this particular attempt, Edwards was 11cm behind the board – “not bad,” he says – at the precise point of lift-off. The major technical change that year, he explains, was moving to a double-arm circular rotation that he had noticed in both the Bulgarian 1988 Olympic champion Khristo Markov and the American great Mike Conley. This was hugely significant in improving his balance and so optimising his centre of gravity for the final forward drive.
The jump
It is fascinating, then, to hearEdwards explain how becoming more powerful later in his career did not help him jump further. This is because of the importance of staying so rhythmically flat to the ground, rather than sacrificing any speed or control with excessive bounce.
Nailing a jump also requires a certain effortless timing and it was surely significant that Edwards was naturally well coordinated across a range of sports. Incredibly, Edwards would cover more than seven metres in the final jump phase of his world record, which pretty much matched his 7.50m personal best in the long jump.
“That tells you how well the previous bits have gone,” he says. “I’m completely balanced, and maintaining the speed. Those contacts on the ground were so short; almost like a bounce as soon as you land. If you are on the ground too long then you over-rotate and you can’t get into position.
“I wasn’t that good at explosive one-off jumping – I couldn’t dunk a basketball – but I maintained my speed better than anybody. There’s an unusual set of physical attributes which made me a very good triple jumper. It’s not just about one of those interlocking parts but the coordination of them all. I liken it to the golf swing – just suddenly everything clicks, it’s beautifully easy and the ball flies in a way that you don’t normally hit it.”
The record
As Edwards then completes the jump with a landing that a gymnast would struggle to better, an unblemished aesthetic sequence is completed by an almost regal raise of both arms. “I knew it was better in an instant – that was the most surreal moment,” he now says. “There was a serenity … a calm. I knew it was a world record – that’s why I shrugged my shoulders.”
Edwards had celebrated rather more wildly 15 minutes earlier but this was different; less an outpouring of emotion and more a wait to savour while the officials added formal validation to what had just happened. The crowd began clapping rhythmically before an audible gasp as the digits 18.29 popped up. It was also the only time that any triple jumper has officially surpassed 60 feet.
The standing ovation told its own story, with Queen Silvia of Sweden – who remains on the throne after almost 50 years – later presenting the gold medal. Edwards was duly named international male athlete of the year, ahead of world champions and fellow all-time greats that year who included Michael Johnson, Haile Gebrselassie, Sergey Bubka and Jan Zelezny.
The aftermath
Back home in Britain, and this God-fearing dad – described in a five-page Sports Illustrated feature as looking more like a secondary-school teacher than a global sports star – had transcended athletics. Edwards suddenly needed a diary secretary and an agent, and he would soon beat the newly-crowned world heavyweight champion Frank Bruno to BBC Sports Personality of the Year.
“It was nuts,” says Edwards. “I’d grown up thinking, ‘Well, I’m good at sport, but just at school level, maybe county level, not at a world level’. To suddenly be thrust into the position of being the best in the world was really bizarre. I was always very shy. I wouldn’t even read the church lesson in my dad’s church.
“There’s nice benefits of being famous. But I think, overall, it impacted me and the family much more than I realised at the time. People asked me to do more and I hosted things. It was good but also a bit peculiar. It’s not a life I ever thought I’d have.”
There was, of course, then huge expectation to follow it all up at the Olympic Games in 1996 and, while a leap of 17.88m would have been good enough to win every gold since, he was narrowly beaten by the American Kenny Harrison. Edwards would be 34 by the time of the Sydney Olympics.
Yet with the grey hairs now evident, he showed vast competitive steel from 1998 until 2002; relentlessly putting together championship-winning leaps of between 17.71m and 17.99m in claiming a clean sweep of Olympic, world, European and Commonwealth golds. Only Sally Gunnell and Daley Thompson among British athletes have simultaneously held those titles as well as the world record.
Edwards retired from competition in 2003 and became a presenter both for the BBC’s athletics coverage and Songs of Praise. He worked on documentaries and became heavily involved in the 2012 London Olympic bid.
“My life was busier than ever – full and incredibly fulfilling,” he says. But it has since emerged that Edwards was simultaneously also dealing with a deeply personal challenge to his faith. That became public in 2012 when he made the decision to step away from presenting Songs of Praise.
“I just stopped believing in God,” he now says. “I was brought up in a very strong Christian home. This was the truth, and I followed that. And then I did my athletics as an outworking of my faith. They were tied together. I took God into every competition. I had a mindset that I was doing it not for my own glorification but for a bigger purpose.
“It gave me a context and a framework for dealing with the pressure. To have questioned my faith would have almost questioned my entire existence with my sport. So I think when I stopped athletics, I almost had a freedom to question.
“I think my horizons broadened because I was coming down to London to do different things, working with people who had different belief systems. It wasn’t that I was disillusioned with the church or that some very traumatic thing happened.
“Alison’s been great. She has a very strong faith and continues to have a strong faith. I think we managed it very, very well. It wasn’t an issue for the boys [they have two grown-up sons]. I think my parents found it harder. Some of our friends found it harder. It was a big change.”
Thirty years on
Edwards still lives with Alison in the same part of Newcastle. His personal sporting pleasures have spread to cycling and especially golf, at which he plays off a handicap of two and is an R&A ambassador. He also remains a fan of athletics – describing the field events currently as “magnificent” – but thinks that the ongoing survival of his world record is “not a good sign” for the sport.
“It’s great that it hasn’t been broken but I think given the advances in tracks, in spikes, in nutrition, in sports science, training methods, it should be broken,” he says. “I just don’t think athletics has kept pace as sports got more and more professional. If you’re a talented young athlete, you’re probably not going to gravitate towards track and field. I think [Usain] Bolt, in a way, papered over the cracks for a lot of years.”
Retirement can be challenging for any sportsperson, particularly after an achievement so towering. Edwards, though, strikes a lovely blend of down-to-earth modesty at what he did while also still being able to take great pleasure from that August night in Gothenburg three decades ago.
“It was a magical year and here we are, 30 years on, talking about it,” he says. “That’s remarkable. I don’t get recognised so much now, which is fine, but some of the things people say about that jump, and the impact it had on them, is lovely.
“That jump defines me as an athlete without question – not the Olympic gold, as wonderful as that was. There’s no comparison in my mind between the emotion of that and when I finally won the Olympics. That is what brings a smile to my face.
“I do think athletics, in its essence, is a demonstration of human potential. How far can you push yourself? How fast can you run? How far can you jump? How far can you throw? And, for me, the excitement was always taking out the tape measure at school and seeing if I got a personal best. That was the magic of that moment too – there was a simplicity and innocence to it all.”
Category: General Sports
