30 Feet/ 9.144 Meters: Brought Me Gold (Twenty-Eight Years Old, Kirk Haley, Olympic Gold Medal Winner, Long Jump) Saturday, August 1, 2020 Tokyo, Japan

I was an unknown but I would become known.  I had asked my coach, Chloe Joi Thompson, for some three years, a year before the XXXII Olympiad in Tokyo, "What will it take to win this event?"  She looked at me and said, "Thirty-feet and there will be no problem at all.  But you have to get your speed approach to the maximum.  You have the height.  We just need more velocity on the approach.  And you don't even have to worry about scratching because you are consistently taking off from the middle of the board."  Cool.  So I started pondering before the World Championships just before the Olympics how I could get my speed up before I had to get ready and finally at the end of the runway shorten my last step before I took off.  And I finally came up with how I could go where no man has gone before, thirty feet and beyond.  And Chloe hugged me and looked at me and said, "Brilliant!"

It was all in the time and place.  Mike Powell, the world record holder had gone out 29 feet 4 and1/4 inches in the same city, Tokyo, Japan.  Carl Lewis, the third best in the world, had gone 29 feet and 1 inch in the same city, Tokyo, Japan.  And Bob Beamon had the Olympic record of 29 feet 2 and 1/4 inches, though in Mexico City.  It was all in the cards.  And all were going to fall to a little unknown like me because this was all that I wanted to do, to break the Long Jump Olympic, American and World Record.

I didn't use my "Brilliant" plan like coach Thompson expressed to me until the Olympics.  I had broken the World record the year before by 3/4 of an inch.  But by the next summer I was flying high, figuratively as well as literally, with the gold in the Olympics along with the World and American records.

So in the Summer of 2020, Saturday, August 1, 2020 at The Games of The XXXII Olympiad, I soared further than any human had gone before to an exact thirty feet, 9.144 meters to win Gold in the event which I had been preparing for ten years.  And the thing I did differently than any one else in Long Jump history: was to use starting blocks to get to optimal speed before take-off from the board, and have a 19 and 1/2 stride approach.