The Lords of Leaping Trivia Quiz

Answer: Carl Lewis

The great Carl Lewis won a total of nine Olympic gold medals between 1984 and 1996. In addition to being a skilled long jumper he was also a champion sprinter; at his home Games in Los Angeles in 1984 he won the 100 metres and 200 metres individual events as well as the 4 x 100 metres relay title. He retained his 100 metres title in Seoul in 1988 and triumphed again in the relay event in 1992 in Barcelona. The second of his four consecutive Olympic long jump gold medals also granted him the record of being the first man in Olympic history to defend his long jump title. Lewis wasn't however the first man to win gold medals in both a sprint event and the long jump in a single Olympic Games - that honour went to Jesse Owens in 1936.

Lewis's leaping career was not limited to just the Olympic Games - he also won two world championship long jump golds (in 1983 and 1987) and the Pan American Games long jump title in 1987.

Answer: Dick Fosbury

Dick Fosbury of the USA won the gold medal in the high jump at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. However, he is far more famous for popularising the technique that he used to secure his victory, which went on to become the established method for high jumping. The leap now known as the 'Fosbury Flop' involves taking a long curving run up towards the bar and then jumping head first backwards over it. The key idea of the technique is for the leaper to keep their centre of gravity as low as possible throughout the jump - often lower than the height the bar is set at! Prior to the 'Fosbury Flop' the majority of high jumpers employed the 'straddle technique'.

Unlike his flop, Fosbury's international high-jumping career was short-lived. His 1968 Olympic success proved to be his only medal at the top level of international competition.

Answer: Jonathan Edwards

At the 1995 IAAF World Championships in Gothenburg, Jonathan Edwards of Great Britain won the triple jump event with a leap of 18.29 metres. This mark was a new world record, breaking the previous record of 18.16 metres that had been set by Edwards just a few minutes earlier. The second of his two world records that evening was also the first triple jump to exceed the distance of 60 feet. Edwards was also European (indoor and outdoor) champion in 1998, Olympic champion in 2000, world champion again in 2001 and Commonwealth champion in 2002.

After his retirement from athletics, Jonathan Edwards started a new career in television as a presenter and commentator on various sporting events as well as presenting the long-running religious programme 'Songs of Praise'.

Answer: Derek Drouin

The high jump competition at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio was won by the Canadian leaper Derek Drouin. At the time of the event he was the reigning world, Commonwealth and Pan American Games champion and he duly added the Olympic crown to the list in August 2016. He took the Olympic title with a jump of 2.38 metres, two centimetres clear of the silver medallist, Mutaz Essa Barshim of Qatar, and five centimetres ahead of the 2.33 metres recorded by a further four athletes.

With his victory in Rio, Drouin became the first Canadian to win high jump gold since Duncan McNaughton in the 1932 Games.

Answer: Bob Beamon

Bob Beamon's international long jump career was short but memorable. He won a silver medal at the 1967 Pan American Games and followed up that achievement with his magnificent world record-setting jump of 8.90 metres in the Olympic final in Mexico City in 1968. This was the first time in history that the world long jump record had been set at an Olympic Games and particularly notable as he smashed the previous record (held by Igor Ter-Ovanesyan) by an amazing 55 centimetres. The previous average amount the world record had been broken by was just six centimetres.

Beamon was inducted into the U.S National Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1977 and was among the initial inductees of the United States Olympic Hall of Fame in 1983.

Answer: Joćo Carlos de Oliveira

The Brazilian leaper Joćo Carlos de Oliveira competed internationally in both the long jump and the triple jump between 1975 and 1981. In addition to being the double Pan American Games champion in both disciplines he also won two Olympic bronze medals in the triple jump - the second of which was from the highly controversial 1980 Olympics in Moscow where accusations were made that the triple jump officials were biased in favour of Soviet athletes. Joćo Carlos de Oliveira also broke the triple jump world record at the age of just 21 with his leap of 17.89 metres at the 1975 Pan American Games - a mark that stood for ten years.

Unfortunately, de Oliveira's career was cut short in 1981 when he lost a leg in a car accident in Sao Paulo.

Answer: James Connolly

James Connolly became the first medal winner at the 1896 Olympics in Athens thanks to the early scheduling of the 'hop, skip and jump' event on the first day of the Games. However, he didn't get to take home a gold medal as that award wasn't introduced until the 1904 event. Instead he got a silver medal, an olive branch and a diploma stating his achievement. Despite the different name, this event was essentially the modern triple jump, although not all of the seven competitors from five countries employed a technique that actually involved a hop, a skip and a jump.

Connolly's winning distance of 13.71 metres would only have been enough to net him a third-place finish four years later in Paris (he actually jumped 13.97 metres and finished second there) and forty years later in Berlin it would only have granted him 22nd place out of 23 finalists.

Answer: Mike Powell

When Mike Powell of the USA took the gold medal in the long jump event at the 1991 world championships he also set a new world record, having beaten the mark set by Bob Beamon in 1968 by five centimetres. Although the USA dominated long jump throughout the 20th century (winning 19 of the 22 Olympic events held), Powell competed in an era of particular achievement for that country - the late 1980s and early 1990s. Despite his world championship success and world record breaking achievements, he never managed to secure an Olympic title. He finished in the silver medal position on two occasions in 1988 and 1992. Both times the podium was an all-American affair with Carl Lewis taking the golds, Powell the silvers and Larry Myricks (1988) and Joe Greene (1992) completing the line up with the bronzes.

Powell retired from athletics following the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta where he had finished the final in fifth place.

Answer: Javier Sotomayor

Javier Sotomayor was one of the most successful high jumpers of all time, not least when he set a new world record in 1989 and became the first man to clear a height of 2.44 metres - or a smidgen over eight feet. That historic achievement was actually the second of three occasions on which Sotomayor broke the world record for high jump, the first was in 1988 when he broke Patrick Sjöberg's record with a jump of 2.43 metres and the third came in 1993 when he again bettered his own mark with a leap of 2.45 metres.

Despite Sotomayor's acknowledged dominance of the high jump in the 1980s and 1990s, he only won a single Olympic gold medal thanks to a Cuban boycott of the 1984 and 1988 Games and an injury in 1996. He took silver in Sydney in 2000 shortly before the end of his career, a moment which was marred by drugs testing controversies.

Answer: Viktor Saneyev

Viktor Saneyev was born in Georgia in 1945, while that nation was still part of the Soviet Union. In addition to his three Olympic gold medals, he also won a silver medal in the controversial triple jump event at the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow and was European champion on two occasions in 1969 and 1974.

His Olympic successes also included numerous breaks of the world record for the triple jump. He set a new world record twice during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City (in fact the record was broken numerous times by several different athletes as the competition developed). That Games in general saw a large number of world records fall, mainly due to the high altitude of the location. Saneyev's record stood for nearly three years, but he was able to regain it in 1972 with a leap of 17.44 metres and held it for another three years before it was broken by the Cuban Pedro Pérez.