Cuban 19-year-old Juan Miguel Echevarria unleashed the farthest long jump under any conditions in 23 years, leaping 8.83 meters (29 feet, 11 1/2 inches) at a Diamond League meet in Stockholm on Saturday.
It would have been the fifth-best jump of all time (Mike Powell‘s world record from 1991 is 8.95) if not for too much tailwind. Echevarria jumped with 2.1 meters/second wind in his favor. The maximum allowable tailwind for record purposes is 2.0 meter/second.
Echevarria must settle for having the farthest jump under any conditions since countryman Ivan Pedroso‘s controversial 8.96-meter jump at altitude in the Italian Alps in 1995 that would have been a world record. Italian media quickly questioned Pedroso’s jump, reporting a man standing in front of the wind gauge on the Cuban’s attempts.
There were 60 long jumps and triple jumps at that meet, and 56 exceeded the maximum allowable wind for record purposes. Three of the four legal jumps were Pedroso’s, including the “record” jump at 1.2 meters per second, according to 1995 reports.
Italy’s track and field federation didn’t even bother submitting the jump to the sport’s international governing body for world record ratification, given the circumstances.
STOCKHOLM: Full meet results
Back to Echevarria. He won the world indoor title on March 2 and on Sunday beat both Olympic champion Jeff Henderson from the U.S. and world outdoor champion Luvo Manyonga of South Africa.
The Diamond League takes a 20-day break before the next meet in Paris. The USATF Outdoor Championships are next for top Americans from June 21-24.
In other events Sunday, Olympic 100m hurdles champion Brianna McNeal clocked the fastest time since July 4, winning in 12.38 seconds. The field did not include world-record holder Kendra Harrison or world champion Sally Pearson of Australia.
Armand Duplantis, the recent Lafayette (La.) high school graduate who pole vaults for Sweden, beat world champion Sam Kendricks for the first time in seven head-to-heads. Duplantis cleared 5.86 meters, while Kendricks came in second at 5.81. World-record holder and 2012 Olympic champion Renaud Lavillenie holds the best clearance in the world this year of 5.95, but the Frenchman wasn’t in Sunday’s field.
Jamaican Fedrick Dacres won a discus that included the top five men in the world this year. Dacres threw 69.67 meters, the world’s farthest mark since last June 29.
Bahamian Steven Gardiner, who ranks No. 2 in the 400m and No. 3 in the 200m this year, stumbled coming around the turn of the 200m and stopped, taking off his left shoe while being attended to. World champion Ramil Guliyev of Turkey won in 19.92 seconds, shy of the 2018 world lead of 19.69 shared by South African Clarence Munyai and American Noah Lyles.
In the 1500m, American Jenny Simpson aimed for her first Diamond League win in three years, but nobody could hang with Ethiopian Gudaf Tsegay, who clocked a meet record 3:57.64 and won by .89 of a second over Brit Laura Muir. Simpson was fourth.
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