Athletics · 1968 · Mexico City, Mexico
The Jump That Broke the Measuring Board
One long jump at the 1968 Olympics lands so far beyond the existing world record that the stadium's optical measuring device has nothing to say about it.
8.90m
Distance
+55cm
Record margin
22 years, 316 days
Record stood
Bob Beamon arrived in Mexico City talented and unreliable, and had fouled his way through the qualifying round before scraping into the final. On his first jump there, he went down the runway and landed clean past the rail the sandpit used to measure with.
The optical device could not produce a reading, never having been built for a jump of that length, so officials went to find a tape measure. The figure came back as 8.90 metres, and Beamon's teammate Ralph Boston had to convert it into feet before he understood it. He collapsed to the ground. The existing world record had gone by 55 centimetres, a margin without precedent in the event's history.
The altitude helped, and so did a following wind sitting right on the legal limit. Neither accounts for the size of it. The jump stood for almost 23 years, until Mike Powell finally beat it in 1991, and it left athletics a word it still uses: 'Beamonesque', for a performance so far ahead of its time that it moves the ceiling.
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