It was the long jump of the century and it is still an Olympic record, but the American Bob Beamon will part with the gold medal he won at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, after a historic jump to 8 .90 m. The medal will be sold at auction on Thursday in New York by the company Christie’s, which values it between 400,000 and 600,000 dollars, in a context of enthusiasm among collectors, ready to pay millions to treat themselves to souvenirs of legendary moments of the sport.
“I am 77 years old (…) I took advantage of it (…) And the time has come for me to pass (the medal) on to someone who appreciates the sporting feat” carried out on October 18, 1968 at the University Olympic Stadium in Mexico City, Bob Beamon said in a telephone interview with AFP, when asked why he was parting with this prestigious award.
“This auction was an excellent way to showcase the medal, but also to preserve its memory,” he adds, imagining that the buyer, whether a collector or an institution, will want “ expose it” in the run-up to the Paris Olympic Games.
“An extraordinary day”
This October 18, Bob Beamon remembers it as an “extraordinary day”. Arriving in the final at the last minute, after two bad attempts in qualifying, the athlete is especially keen to validate his first jump while avoiding missing the board or its landing.
“To my great surprise, it wasn’t just a (successful) jump, it was an incredible moment of history,” he recalls. “Everything was perfect, the wind was perfect, the weather was perfect.”
At 8.90 m, the world record was shattered by 55 cm and we had to wait until the world championships in Tokyo in 1991, and the legendary duel between Mike Powell and Carl Lewis, to see better, with the 8-person jump, 95m from Powell. But 55 years and 13 editions of the Summer Olympics later, Bob Beamon still holds the Olympic long jump record.
If Mexico-68 made history, it was above all for the gesture of American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, excluded for life from the Olympics after raising a black-gloved fist on the 200-meter podium in protest against discrimination. African-Americans in the United States.
The next day, Bob Beamon took the podium, black socks pulled up and visible, and he also raised his fist, in a similar gesture.
Today, it is his rediscovered passion for music that excites him. Bob Beamon returned to drums and percussion, which he had abandoned as a teenager, “because sport came before everything else”. Born in Queens, New York, Robert Beamon was less than a year old when his mother died of tuberculosis and he did not know his father.
“My luck,” he says today, “is that I recorded an album with a jazz, funk, hip-hop group, called +Stix bones and the bone squad+. And I’m having fun a lot”.