Surely that would be during the 1991 IAAF World Championships in Athletics held in Tokyo, Japan.
Until now, the whole championships, and possibly the whole of athletics history, is best remembered for the men’s long jump competition, when Carl Lewis made the best six-jump series in history, only to be beaten by Mike Powell, whose 8.95 m jump broke Bob Beamon’s 23-year-old world record set at the 1968 Mexico Olympics.
Powell was Lewis’s main rival of the last few years, finishing second behind him at the 1988 Olympics. In 1990, Powell was the world’s top-ranked long jumper, but until that August night Lewis had not lost a long jump competition in 10 years, winning 65 consecutive competitions. Every time they met, Powell was unable to beat Lewis, usually fouling his best jumps.
This is a log of the 1991 competition. Powell jumped first. The conditions were hot and humid, and there was a strange swirling wind, hardly ideal conditions to beat Beamon’s record, but the truth would soon be revealed.
1st jump:
Powell: foul.
Lewis: 8.68 m (a World Championships record - a mark bettered by only 3 other persons in history).
2nd jump:
Powell: 8.54 m (now in silver medal position)
Lewis: [unknown]
3rd jump:
Powell: [unknown]
Lewis: 8.83 m (wind-aided. This jump would have won every long jump competition in history except two, but even this would turn out to be not enough to win. It was Lewis’ best jump ever at that time, but incredibly, later in the evening he would better this mark.)
4th jump:
Powell: jumped a long foul, estimated to be around 8.80 m.
Lewis: 8.91 m (wind-aided, so it could not be considered a world record, but would still count in the competition. That meant Lewis had exceeded Beamon’s “immortal” 8.90 m world record with the greatest leap ever under all conditions, at that time of course.)
5th jump:
Powell: 8.95 m (The crowd exploded when the distance was revealed, a new world record, surpassing Beamon’s 23-year-old mark. Note that Lewis still had 2 more jumps to try to top this. David Culbert, an Australian competitor (he finished 6th at 8.02 m) had this to say:
I was sitting next to Powell throughout the competition, calming him down after a massive round four foul and telling him bluntly to sit down and chill out after he wildly celebrated his world record. “Mate, Carl has still got two more jumps. You’d better settle down because he might jump 9.10m and you’ll need to respond,” or words to that effect. By the horrified look on Mike’s face, he realised I wasn’t joking. Though Lewis deserved to break the world record and take the victory, it would have consigned Powell to athletics trivia had he been out jumped in the final two rounds. Lewis produced two more stunning jumps, an incredible 8.87m followed by 8.84m in the last two rounds as he searched in vain for the extra few centimetres that would elevate him to victory. On Lewis’ final jump, Powell lay on the ground - head in his hands, unable to watch. Once the result was semaphored, he rose to his feet and surrounded by the press pack congratulated Lewis. After my final jump he embraced me. “Thanks mate,” he said in his LA drawl.
Lewis: 8.87 m (I remembered the intensity in Lewis’s face as he concentrated on doing this 5th jump, a few minutes after Powell destroyed a record deemed unbreakable. He was, suddenly, not chasing Beamon anymore, but rather Powell! This jump is his new personal best under legal wind conditions, in fact he was jumping *against* the wind!)
6th (and final) jump:
Powell: [unknown]
Lewis: 8.84 m (To Lewis’ credit, despite the incredible pressure of having to beat a world record which had just been set, he still achieved the 3rd and 5th greatest legal long jumps in history [the 2nd and 3rd longest at low altitude, behind only Powell’s record]).
Powell said later:
“I timed it. It was five minutes and 31 seconds from the time [Lewis] walked onto the runway to the time he jumped. My heart was beating very quickly. I started to feel faint. I hoped not, but deep down, I thought he would beat me.”
Not that time. Then Powell was off, running down the infield leaping and whooping and hugging the official who had red-flagged him on an earlier huge leap.
To put it in perspective, Lewis had performed the greatest series of jumps in history (4 jumps over 8.80 m) even besting the old world record with a wind-aided jump, but *still* lost the competition.
More than 15 years later Powell’s record still stands, while Lewis’ legal jumps rank as 3rd and 5th all-time.
Powell and Lewis never jumped so far during the rest of their careers again.
The competition was so intense that they refused to do a joint press conference afterwards. Later, Lewis was grudging in his comment of Powell’s achievement: “He just did it. It was that close, and it was the best of his life, and he may never do it again.”
Bronze medalist Larry Myricks was left almost half a metre behind, at 8.42.
The standard set is so high that the best jump ever made (as of 2nd June 2007) since then is a mere 8.74 m by Erick Walder in April 1994. Further, the best jump of the 21st century so far is even shorter: 8.66 m by Louis Tsatoumas (Greece) in June 2007, which stands at no.8 on the all-time list of performers. All the top 7 jumpers set their best mark in 1995 or earlier.
Powell’s initial reaction was one of utter disbelief, and ended with a smile and shake of the head. His future jumps never approached such incredible distances again. The next year, at the 1992 Olympics, Powell and Lewis dueled again. It was still a close fight, with Lewis this time edging Powell 8.67 - 8.64.
At the 1993 World Championships Powell won gold again but at the relatively short distance of 8.59 m, while silver medalist Stanislav Tarasenko’s (Russia) best jump is only 8.16 m. At the 1995 World Championships, Powell only won bronze with 8.29. That event was won by Ivan Pedroso at 8.70 m, still well behind the standard set 4 years earlier.
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