He was responsible for creating this behemoth, for ensuring generations of high school throwers didn’t even have a chance of breaking the shot put national record. Every year, you can try to be a Super Bowl champion, but that is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I took advantage of it.” You have a lot of NCAA champions, you have a lot of state champions. That is something that no one’s ever done…Forty years later, it’s still there. “I say, you know I’m an android, right? I’m the only person on this planet that threw over 81 feet in competition.
“They laughed at the beginning, but they don’t laugh anymore,” Carter says. So yes, Michael Carter is quite sure that throwing 81-3.5 is his greatest athletic accomplishment. But in the 40 years since Carter’s record toss in Sacramento, no one has come within four feet of it. It took 32 years for someone to surpass Carter’s second-best throw - in 2011, Ryan Crouser, who would go on to become the 2016 Olympic champion, threw 77-2.75 at an indoor meet in Idaho, still the only other time a high schooler has surpassed 77 feet. When Carter threw 81-3.5, it wouldn’t have been unfair to ask whether he belonged to a different species. Running 12.5% faster than the existing mile world record would put you at 3:15. Running 12.5% faster than the existing marathon world record would put you at 1:46. To run up the same gap to the #2 performer in history, Beamon would have had to have leaped 30-9.75 in Mexico City. The difference between Carter and the second-best thrower in high school history at the time, Sammy Walker (72-3.25), was just over nine feet, or 12.5%. When Bob Beamon jumped 29-2.5 at the 1968 Olympics, he broke the existing world record by 6.6% Carter’s throw at Golden West was similarly impressive, a 5.6% improvement on the existing high school record.īut those were the gaps to the previous records, which, in Carter’s case, was held by Carter himself. Usually, the term for an achievement like that is Beamonesque. Throwers do not PR by four feet, especially when they already own the national record, and especially when that record is almost five feet farther than the next-closest high school throw. When Carter unleashed his record toss at the Golden West Invitational on June 16, 1979, the national record stood at 77 feet even, which he had set a month earlier in Abilene, Tex. Better than an Olympic medal? Better than three Super Bowls? When Carter used to tell people that his finest hour as an athlete was setting the national high school record in the shot put, they would assume he was joking. He casts his mind back to an evening four decades ago in Sacramento, when he lined up for his final throw in a high school shot put ring and sent a 12-pound ball of metal flying 81 feet, three-and-a-half inches into eternity. More: Drake Relays return to Des Moines.He earned All-Pro honors as an NFL nose tackle and won three Super Bowls.īut ask Michael Carter for his greatest athletic accomplishment, and he doesn’t hesitate. She had her left leg amputated below the knee when she was a toddler. Heims was born with amniotic band syndrome, a condition where tissue from the amniotic sac wrap around and compromise an unborn babies’ limbs. "There is no better place to do it than the blue oval. It really caught me by surprise," Heims said. Heims had a toss of 37.23 meters (122 feet, 3 inches) to break the previous F64 paralympic mark of 36.53 meters (119-10) set by Poland’s Faustyna Kotlowska in 2001.įor Heims, there was no other place in the world she would rather set a world record than Drake Stadium. On Friday at the Drake Relays, Heims cemented her place in history, setting a world record in the discus. Heims, a graduate of Prairie High School and the University of Northern Iowa, already has qualified for three Paralympic Games. Cedar Rapids native Jessica Heims has become an international track and field star.
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