Long jump at the Olympics

Long jump at the Olympic Games
Dawn Burrell in the 2000 Olympic long jump competition
Overview
Sport	Athletics
Gender	Men and women
Years held	Men: 1896–2024 Women: 1948–2024
Olympic record
Men	8.90 m Bob Beamon (1968)
Women	7.40 m Jackie Joyner-Kersee (1988)
Reigning champion
Men	Miltiadis Tentoglou (GRE)
Women	Tara Davis-Woodhall (USA)

The long jump at the Summer Olympics, is grouped among the four track and field jumping events held at the multi-sport event. The men's long jump has been present on the Olympic athletics programme since the first Summer Olympics in 1896. The women's long jump was introduced over fifty years later in 1948, and was the second Olympic jumping event for women after the high jump, which was added in 1928.

The Olympic records for the event are 8.90 m (29 ft 2+1⁄4 in) for men, set by Bob Beamon in 1968, and 7.40 m (24 ft 3+1⁄4 in) for women, set by Jackie Joyner-Kersee in 1988. Beamon's mark is the longest-standing Olympic athletics record by a margin of twelve years, which was the only time a man has set a long jump world record at the competition. The women's world record has been broken on two occasions at the Olympics, with Mary Rand jumping 6.76 m (22 ft 2 in) in 1964 and Viorica Viscopoleanu clearing 6.82 m (22 ft 4+1⁄2 in) in 1968. In 1956, Elżbieta Krzesińska jumped 6.35 m (20 ft 10 in) to equal her own world record.^[1]

Ellery Clark and Olga Gyarmati were the first men's and women's Olympic long jump champions. Miltiadis Tentoglou and Malaika Mihambo are the reigning Olympic champions from 2020. Carl Lewis is the event's most successful athlete as he was Olympic champion four times consecutively from 1984 to 1996. Heike Drechsler is the only woman to win two Olympic long jump titles. Ralph Boston and Jackie Joyner-Kersee are the only other two athletes to win three Olympic long jump medals in their careers. The United States is the most successful nation in the event.

A standing long jump variant of the event was contested from 1900 to 1912 and standing jumps specialist Ray Ewry won all but one of the gold medals in its brief history.