Marquise Goodwin, the San Francisco 49ers wide receiver, insists he wasn’t kidding when he proclaimed in April that he would win the 2020 Olympic long jump.
“Yes, 100 percent interest,” Goodwin said Tuesday. “But we’re talking about football right now. 2020 next year.”
Goodwin is already an Olympian, finishing 10th in the long jump at the 2012 London Games before his last season at the University of Texas. After two seasons with the Buffalo Bills, Goodwin went back to the track and failed in a Rio Olympic bid even though he had the world’s two farthest jumps that year going into the U.S. Olympic Trials.
Goodwin said he had “ceased competing” in track and field when he was suspended one year from April 1, 2017, for not updating drug-testing whereabouts forms. Goodwin stopped filling out the forms after going back to the NFL in 2016.
But now, at 28, he could look to become the oldest U.S. man to compete in an Olympic long jump since Carl Lewis won his record fourth straight gold at the 1996 Atlanta Games. His best long jump in 2016 — 8.45 meters — would rank first among Americans in this Olympic cycle.
However, Goodwin did not provide specifics Tuesday on when he would return to competition.
“It’s just offseason, same way I did it in high school, college, NFL,” he said. “Just make it happen. It’s all on my off time. I use it as part of my training. What I do in long jump, in track and field, definitely correlates with what I do as a wide receiver with being fast, being explosive, putting my foot down. It’s the same mechanics that I use in football.”
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