Arriving in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, triple jumper Jonathan Edwards made an unlikely purchase in duty free.
He decided to pick up a pair of sunglasses – not for sunning himself on the city’s ample and attractive coastline, but because he wanted them for the upcoming world championships, the biggest event on the track and field calendar that year.
Edwards was terrified, and the glasses, he reasoned, would mask that fear from his other competitors.
“I thought I could easily not win,” recalls Edwards, who entered the 1995 world championships in the form of his life. “The potential was there for me not to win, and that would be a disaster, even though I jumped so well throughout the year.”
He didn’t have to worry. Edwards broke his own world record twice on that day, jumping a gargantuan 18 meters and 29 centimeters (slightly over 60 feet) with his second attempt. His next closest rival, Bermuda’s Brian Wellman, couldn’t get within half a meter (1.64 feet).
Thursday marks exactly 30 years since Edwards hopped, skipped and jumped his way into the history books, making it one of track and field’s longest-standing records.
Only American Christian Taylor has come within 10 centimeters (about 3.94 inches) of the record since then, and only eight athletes in history have jumped beyond 18 meters (roughly 59.05 feet).
Edwards rarely tires of watching back footage of the feat: his electric speed down the runway, the bounding strides of his jumping action, and the enormous final vault into the sandpit.
Leaping beyond the 18-meter-long measurement board, Edwards knew instantly that he had broken the record twice in quick succession. He raised his hands in the air, then, after a torturous wait to see his result appear on the big screen, simply shrugged his shoulders as if to say: “I’ve done it again.”
“It’s a wonderful thing, and it brings a smile to my face,” Edwards tells CNN Sports. “Although it’s me, there’s something very aesthetically pleasing about watching that jump.
“To hold a world record, to do something better than anybody else has done in the history of the world, it’s remarkable,” he adds. “And it’s just me – my little, skinny, White legs. It’s a lovely thing.”
From that point, Edwards’ competition was essentially done. He had become the first man to jump beyond 18 meters with his opening attempt, then the first to pass 60 feet (18.288m) with his second.
A third attempt of 17.49m followed later in the competition, but by then the British former athlete had done all that he needed to – and more – for the gold medal. In hindsight, he believes that the first world record paved the way for another.
“I still maintained that sort of heightened sense of readiness for that second jump,” he says. “It was about grasping that moment and enjoying it and not feeling scared stiff about the thought of it going wrong, but rather trying to do something that was just remarkable and enjoying the moment.”
Only a handful of men’s track and field world records have stood for longer than Edwards’ 18.29, including Mike Powell’s 8.95m (about 29.36 feet) for the long jump in 1991 and Javier Sotomayor’s 2.45m (almost 8.04 feet) for the high jump in 1993.
It’s Edwards’ view that the talent pool was “much deeper” for jumping events in the 80s and 90s than it is now – a consequence, he thinks, of limited investment in track and field.
“I don’t think there’s the infrastructure there, the opportunity for young people,” Edwards explains. “Even if there is, athletics is probably not as attractive an option as some of the other sports, which are professionalized much, much better.
“The choice for young people is huge now compared to what it was when I was growing up. I don’t think athletics probably has kept pace very well with the increased professionalization and commercialization of sport, and as a result the talent pool is less, would be my guess.”
That could explain why his triple jump mark has stood for so long, even with developments in nutrition, equipment and sports science.
But Edwards also thinks that the record’s longevity boils down to his unique combination of speed and lightness down the runway, reminiscent of a stone skipping gracefully across a pond. He likes to see his action as more of a bounce than a jump.
“I’ve looked at all the jumpers who have gone since me, and none of them really jumped like me,” says Edwards. “They’re much bigger; I’m very slight.
“I probably didn’t look like a triple jumper … my pure jumping ability is not brilliant … but it’s when you come down to running at full speed and maintaining speed through the phases – I don’t think anybody lands like me and maintains their speed like me, hence jumping the furthest.
“Maybe it’s just that a different style of athlete is doing the triple jump now, much more jumping-led than sprinting-focused,” he adds. “Because people spend much more time on the ground. The longer on the ground, the more speed you lose.”
Edwards’ journey to becoming a professional athlete was unlike most. Rather than his prodigious talent or a breakthrough performance, it was his Christian faith which motivated him to make a living out of the sport, together with the encouragement of his father, a Church of England vicar.
“I don’t think I’d have been an athlete without my faith,” he says. “There was a sense of: God’s given me this gift, as peculiar as it might be, and in the early stages of my life, not that obvious.
“My dad was an important part of this, of encouraging me to try and make the most of my talents. It was a very simple sort of Christian ethic … I was looking to be a good steward of something that I was good at, and in a sense work out my Christian faith in everyday life.”
Edwards, now aged 59, has since lost his faith having once refused to compete on Sundays. He views his Christianity as an unintentional part of his sports psychology when he was competing, “a framework and a context for dealing with the pressure.”
Perhaps it was part of the reason he was able to reach the career heights that he did in 1995. On top of breaking the record three times and winning gold in Gothenburg, Edwards also jumped a staggering 18.43m (almost 60.47 feet) in June that year, though it was never ratified due to favorable wind conditions.
“That still is the single most remarkable day of my career,” Edwards says of the unofficial jump in Lille, France. “I watched that over and over again because it was just such a beautiful thing – the rhythm, the timing, the speed on the runway, everything. It was fabulous. It was a better jump than Gothenburg, I thought, in terms of the technique.”
Edwards was at the peak of his powers then, and he laments not being able to recreate the same driving arm action at other points of his career, even in the following season.
He won silver at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, despite entering the Games as the firm favorite, and upgraded to gold in Sydney four years later, though he describes his winning jump as “not great.”
It was only for a brief window in 1995 that Edwards felt like he had technical mastery over the triple jump, enabling him to jump further than ever before.
“I guess it shows you how tough an event it is to get right because there’s so many moving parts, quite literally, that can go wrong, and each one builds on another one,” he says. “You might have the two best phases, the hop and the step, but you can miss it on the jump phase. There’s a lot that needs to go right to get a record.”
The technique and precision required in an event like the triple jump might be another reason that Edwards’ 18.29 has stood the test of time.
Like all records, it will be broken eventually. Whether that happens anytime soon is another matter, and one which Edwards doesn’t like to spend too long contemplating.
“It’ll be fine if it’s broken, it’s not the be all and end all,” he says, “but at the same time, it’s become part of me. It’s part of my life. It’s an incredible thing to hold a world record, to do something better than anybody else has done it in the history of the world.”
And when the time comes, would he want to be in the stadium to watch his record fall? “I definitely wouldn’t” is Edwards’ instant response. “I’d like to be somewhere out of the way where nobody can get to me, and I can just process it in quiet and silence and isolation.”
Perhaps that would be another reason to reach instinctively for a pair of sunglasses – though this time to disguise the disappointment of an era coming to an end.
