How it unfolded
Beamon, who had fouled twice in qualifying and barely advanced, sprinted flat out down the runway and hit the board perfectly on his first attempt in the final. He landed near the very end of the sand pit. The problem was measurement — the optical rail-mounted measuring device couldn't reach that far, and officials had to bring out a steel tape, taking nearly 20 minutes to produce a result. When 8.90m flashed on the board, Beamon, unfamiliar with metric units, didn't at first grasp the number; when teammate Ralph Boston told him he had cleared 29 feet, his knees buckled and he sank to the ground. The existing world record, 8.35m, had been shared by Boston and the Soviet Union's Igor Ter-Ovanesyan — Beamon beat it by 55cm. Thin air at 2,240 metres altitude and a tailwind right at the legal limit of 2.0 m/s helped, but no one else that day cleared even 8.20m; East Germany's Klaus Beer was second at 8.19m.
Why it still matters
This is a case of a single attempt leaping an entire generation ahead in one event's record book, and the word 'Beamonesque' entered the English language afterward as shorthand for an overwhelming performance. The record stood for 23 years before Mike Powell broke it with 8.95m in Tokyo in 1991. The same Games also produced Dick Fosbury's Flop and the Tommie Smith-John Carlos podium protest.