National Geographic

Weisiger had progressed from learning organ-ically how to land high, tightly spiraled jumpsbecause otherwise she would run into a wall atthe rink, to using her phone to tell how high andlong a skater was in the air while doing a quad.Advances in technology give coaches the abil-ity to help their skaters understand the physicsof these jumps, but something more is at workhere, Weisiger says.“Why wasn’t Dorothy Hamill doing triplejumps?” she asks. “She didn’t have to. Oncewomen started to try triples, everyone had todo them. It’s like anything else: Competitionpushes you along.”In February in Pyeongchang, South Korea,women’s Olympic figure skating champion AlinaZagitova of Russia landed seven triple jumps inher free skate. Chen became the first man toattempt and land six quads in his free skate,finishing fifth overall after a poor short program.SOMETIMES THE MARCH of progress insports is simply the result of an ath-lete’s competitive fire.To my unaided eye, a jump at the 1991 worldtrack and field championships in Tokyo’sNational Stadium looked monstrous. I had beenwatching the best long jumpers in the world formore than an hour, and American Mike Powell’sjump clearly was diferent. Technology wouldconfirm what my eyes were telling me, but Ialready knew. The most legendary and seem-ingly untouchable individual record in Olympicsports, which had stood for a stunning 23 years,had just been broken.My fascination with the advancement ofsports performance didn’t start on that warm,humid August evening, but it certainly got quitea boost. Two inches here and there might notseem like much in our daily lives, but that wasalmost exactly the distance between Bob Bea-mon’s landmark leap of 29 feet 2.39 inches, set atthe 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, and Powell’s29-foot, 4.36-inch jump that night in Tokyo.All these years later, that moment fasci-nates me. Why? With everything science andcomputers and great minds can devise to helphumans perform faster, higher, and stron-ger—and because a sport like track and fieldhas progressed from cinder tracks to syntheticsurfaces, from rudimentary footwear to famousshoe companies trying to outdo one another—record-breaking progress still came down to the``````work of one human being. Sports is now filledwith scientists, coaches, and athletes who mea-sure progress through analytics. But that night,the march of human performance had a face anda name: Mike Powell.The story behind making sports history some-times really isn’t that momentous. In this case,one athlete just became angry with the successof another and wanted to beat him.I called Powell recently in Southern Californiato ask him to relive that moment. There was noparticular science to that night, he told me.Powell said he broke the record because hewas pushed by a competitor: The great CarlLewis, widely considered the best long jumperever, was also in the field. Lewis never broke the``````70 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC