"My gut reaction and my feeling was that I had trained from the time I was seven," he said. But Beamon also saw it as the first opportunity to achieve a dream. He had been "very sympathetic" to the views of many black athletes who wanted to boycott the Olympics that year over racial injustice. Beamon was at the University of Texas at El Paso at the time and was warned by the athletics director that he would lose his scholarship if he went ahead with the boycott.īrigham was a Mormon school and the athletes were angry because they thought the institution promoted racial injustice.īeamon told Sky Sports News: "There was not a good feeling or it was addressed as we were not as equal or were looked down upon as black people."īeamon waves after receiving his gold medal on October 18 in Mexico Cityīut Beamon would not back down and with six months to go before the Olympics, he was suspended and his scholarship was taken away. Just a few days after the death of the civil rights activist, Beamon and some athletes decided to make their own stand.īeamon joined seven athletes to boycott a track meet at Brigham Young University because of their views and treatment of black African Americans. This included the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Growing up, Beamon had experienced racial injustice and division across the United States.
He said 'Bob, you just jumped over 29 feet.' When he mentioned that we were actually walking and then all of a sudden I was on the ground."Īmerican long jumper Mike Powell broke Beamon's long jump record in 1991īeamon still holds the Olympic record and it is still the longest-standing record in a summer Olympics. "Ralph was very familiar with centimetres and all of that kind of good stuff - Ralph started calculating. Boston had won gold in the 1960 Olympics and silver in the 1964 Games.īeamon explains what happened next. With Beamon unfamiliar with the metric system, he turned to his friend Ralph Boston, who had helped to train Beamon and was a friend and rival for gold. "And so they measured it at eight metres and 90cm and of course I didn't even know what metres were! I only knew feet! And even today I have problems with centimetres," said the 1968 Olympic champion. It took 20 minutes for the distance to be announced.
HIGH JUMP WORLD RECORD MANUAL
"And so they had to go and find a manual tape to actually measure the jump because the electronic device only went up to about 28 feet and some change." 'I didn't understand metres and centimetres!' "The judge kept pointing to the devices, 'there's no there's no indent in the sand here'," the 74-year-old added. "But what was happening was … the officials were trying to measure the jump on the electronic device, and the judge that was in charge of the electronic device kept telling the head judge 'we can't see it on the electronic scope'."Īt this stage, Beamon thought he could have broken the world record by a couple of inches and the officials were being careful. Beamon's record jump is one of the iconic moments in Olympic history
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