For Two Weeks, People are Going to Care About Track & Field: Here Are Some Athletes You Should watch (Part III, JuVaughn Harrison)
(*This is the third in an ongoing series in the run-up to the 7/29/21 start date of Athletics at the Tokyo Olympic Games, featuring key track and field athletes to watch from the United States of America.)
JuVaughn Harrison: Multi-hyphenated Badass
JuVaughn Harrison was born before Y2k was stressing out your parents.
JuVaughn Harrison was born a mere 7 months before this happened:
Okay, okay. You get it. Dude is young.
His resume reads like a shitty warm-up exercise for an improv class.
Did Harrison, the reigning NCAA Long Jump champion, jump a staggering 27–9 ½ inches to win the US Olympic trials this past June?
Yes, and…
Did Harrison, the reigning NCAA High Jump champion, clear 7–7 ¾ inches to also win the US Olympic trials high jump?
Yes, and…
Did he do all this while being a biomedical engineering major and having impeccable IG drip?
You tell me.
So, why don’t you know his name? Why aren’t you familiar with the first man to ever win the high jump-long jump double at the NCAA Championships (a feat he accomplished twice while at LSU)?
Because track and field sucks at marketing their up-and-coming stars.
And, make no mistake, a guy who can just flat out jump? Like Harrison?!?! We should be promoting the ever-loving, vertical and horizontal shit out of this guy.
He should be high jumping over Kevin Durant and into a pile of Wheaties.
He is doing something so unprecedented that the last US man to represent the stars and stripes in the Olympics for both the high jump and long jump was Jim Thorpe. That was in 1912 and Harrison jumps about 4-feet longer on average (*Author’s note: RIP, my mentions when the Thorpe-hive reads this).
Out of the 27 times the men’s long jump has been contested in the Olympic games, the United states has won all but six, but Harrison’s victory is anything but preordained. We’ve seen exactly how bizarre the Olympic games can be, and this latest iteration — with an assist to Covid — could be even wilder.
He’ll have to get past Miltiádis Tentóglou of Greece, a man who is as long into the sand as he is on confidence, and he’ll also be facing down more experienced international competitors.
In the high jump, he’ll be going toe to toe with the legendary Qatari high jumper, Mutaz Barshim, who has consistently been one of the world’s best. Barshim, or as Dad’s would call him, Mutazmanian Devil, amirite?, has multiple world championships and Olympic medals to his name.
He’ll also be facing down the double scrawny white dude duo of Ilya Ivanyuk of Russia-cheated-so-much-they-don’t-get-to-be-mentioned-here and guy-who-definitely-looks-like-he-should-be-in-a-TikTok-Hype-House, Maksim Nedasekau from Belarus.
While Harrison is undoubtedly used to having tight schedules and pulling double duty at big events, it’s worth noting that this will be his biggest championship meet to date.
Get your trapper keepers ready, pull out your planners, because according to the Olympic website, here’s what the sched will look like:
His busy four-day schedule kicks off with high jump qualifying on Friday morning (7/30) then continues with long jump qualifying on Saturday evening (7/31) followed by the high jump final on Sunday night (8/1) and long jump final on Monday morning, 15 hours and 10 minutes later.
Regardless of how things progress, you know it’s going to be a hell of a time watching JuVaughn Harrison go so high and so far that you have to fully mess with the aspect ratio on your TV just to keep him on the screen.
Can he absolutely do what he’s always done? Something unrivaled and unique and record-breaking?
Yes, and…
The Sha’Carri Richardson Memorial Olympic Weed Fact:
The method in which a high jumper leaps into the air backwards, folding themselves neatly in two, as they soar up and over the bar was typically credited to 1968 Olympic Gold Medalist, Dick Fosbury.
Well, what if I told you that, in fact Fosbury may not have been the first guy to actually jump over a bar with that particular method? What if I told you that big High Jump had been lying to you all along and that this obscure photo from 1963 of a high school athlete in Missoula Montana may have been the first documented athlete to go over the bar backwards?
Does this sound like you’re talking to someone super high? Red pilled yet?
Anyway, here’s the picture:
That’s Bruce Quande, the based god. So, really, we should all be calling that the Bruce Bounce.
