Ulrike Meyfarth might be best known for winning Olympic high jump titles some 12 years apart but did you know the German was the last athlete to break the world high jump record at the European Athletics Championships?
She achieved this feat more than 40 years ago in Athens 1982, clearing a height that would have won gold at the last six editions of the European Athletics Championships.
The background
“If every event could be predicted from the ranking lists, there would be no point in having an Olympics at all. And once in a while an unexpected champion steals the limelight from the less surprising winners. So it was with Ulrike Meyfarth,” reported the great athletics writer Mel Watman for Athletics Weekly in his dispatches from the 1972 Olympic Games.
A 16-year-old Meyfarth became not just the youngest ever Olympic high jump champion but the sport’s youngest ever gold medallist with a wholly unforeseen but enduringly memorable victory on home soil in Munich 1972.
Having only finished third at the West German Championships, Meyfarth was expected to accrue no more than experience in her first major championships but the teenager ended up qualifying for the final. And the story didn’t end there.
Meyfarth added seven centimetres to her lifetime best in the final, ultimately equalling the world record of 1.92m to win by two clear heights before attempting an outright world record of 1.94m.
“I was so relaxed. I didn’t want to win. I just wanted to take part. I was naïve and not a developed athlete. I was new on the scene. It was very special because it was at home. All the Germans in the stadium were standing behind me, crying behind me. It was like a film,” recalled Meyfarth in an interview with Olympics.com last year.
Like with so many teen prodigies in sport, Meyfarth’s progression was far from linear but after enduring some years in the wilderness, the fledgling star returned to the top of the podium once again at the 1982 European Athletics Championships in Athens.
And Meyfarth went one better than she did in Munich, clearing an outright world record height to win the title.
What happened?
Meyfarth led the world list with a 2.00m clearance but she faced opposition from two fellow household names in the world of high jumping: reigning champion Sara Simeoni from Italy, who won gold in Prague with the existing world record of 2.01m, and the Soviet Union’s Tamara Bykova who would succeed Meyfarth as world record-holder.
But a decade after winning Olympic gold as the underdog, Meyfarth proved herself just as capable in the role of outstanding favourite. Meyfarth was the only one of the trio to clear 2.00m, which she did so on her first attempt to maintain a clear scorecard, a performance which won the title by a height.
Meyfarth would raise the bar to 2.02m, a height one centimetre higher than Simeoni’s world record clearance at the 1978 European Athletics Championships.
She brought it down twice but on her third attempt – her 10th jump of the competition – Meyfarth flew clear with her torso several centimetres clear of the bar, adding one centimetre to Simeoni’s record.
On fatigued legs having entered the final at 1.80m, Meyfarth then had three unsuccessful attempts at 2.04m. But the celebrations would soon begin with Meyfarth back on top of the world again after a decade-long absence.
The aftermath
Bykova would deny Meyfarth the full set of high jump titles at the first ever World Athletics Championships in Helsinki in 1983 but she would gain some revenge on the Soviet albeit in rather unusual circumstances.
Meyfarth improved her world record to 2.03m the following week at the European Cup in London although she would only gain partial ownership of the record. Bykova cleared the same height and was given a share of the world record although Meyfarth was credited with the outright victory having cleared 2.03m with her first attempt.
The Soviet boycott of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles prevented a final denouement of this rivalry but the competition did provide one of the most enduring and emotional stories of the Games. Meyfarth’s career would be capped by a second Olympic gold medal in Los Angeles some 12 years after her first, clearing an Olympic record of 2.02m before bowing out from the Olympic stage by attempting 2.07m.
That proved to be the final competition of Meyfarth’s illustrious, remarkable and in many ways unique career as she announced her retirement the following season.
“Many years after my Olympic gold medals I now realise what I did, with my gold medals in 1972 and 1984. It was a special career. No one did it like this,” said Meyfarth, reflecting on her place in Olympic history.
