At the European Indoor Championships in Apeldoorn, multi-discipline athlete Annik Kälin is focusing on the long jump. A discipline that is currently causing a stir.
07.03.2025, 04:17
07.03.2025, 09:38
SDA
In the Netherlands, unlike in Berlin, she does not have to boycott the competition because there is a traditional take-off bar instead of a take-off zone. The qualification is scheduled for Friday morning.
The long jump discipline is currently the subject of discussion and is causing a stir. The rules are being tinkered with, which doesn't suit many or even annoys some. Annik Kälin is one of the latter. A month ago, the athlete from Graubünden canceled her participation in the meeting in Berlin in protest because she found out about the switch from the take-off bar to the take-off zone at short notice.
"As a young athlete, I can't support this project, it's not a sensible innovation," she let her followers know via Instagram. "It's a shame that it divides the long jump family and that the athletes have to position themselves against each other."
"I think what Annik has done is good," says Simon Ehammer a few days later at the media conference for the Swiss Indoor Championships. "I've heard few athletes speak positively about it. Like me, I'm not a fan of it."
40 instead of 20 centimeters
World Athletics wants to make the long jump more attractive to the public. Sebastian Coe, President of the world federation, also proposed this change because around one in three jumps at the 2023 World Championships was invalid. That's boring. The idea: instead of a take-off bar, there is a take-off zone that is 40 cm wide. You can take off from anywhere in it. Cameras measure from where the foot was at take-off instead of from the fixed bar. However, as one bar is colored, it is also possible to determine what the distance would be according to the standard method.
One of the first to ruffle Coe's idea was Carl Lewis. The American, who achieved five of the eight best distances in the history of this discipline in the 1980s and 1990s and replaced Coe as an athletics star, called the innovation an "April Fool's joke" and asked smugly: "Should the baskets in basketball also be made bigger because the players miss them on their free throws?"
But why are so many players against the change, which would lead to more jumps? Is there a lack of willingness to throw traditions overboard for an innovation? Coe has always emphasized that people consume sport differently today and that athletics must keep up in order to maintain the public's favor.
Precision as a central element
"One of the skills of long jumpers and world-class jumpers is to approach at high speed and jump with pinpoint accuracy. I don't see any gain in attractiveness for the spectators, the excitement is even higher with the previous 20-cm bar," Annik Kälin provided reasons for her decision not to compete. In fact, the audience is left in the dark for a while during the zone jump, as it is no longer possible to estimate the distance.
Lewis believes that the change would turn the long jump from one of the most difficult disciplines in athletics into one of the easiest. For Ehammer, too, the long jump is more than just run-up speed and jumping power. "The long jump thrives on absolute perfection. It's about optimizing the run-up so that you have a perfect take-off at the front and then achieve a great distance. Invalid attempts and those where you give away 15 or 20 centimetres are part of it."
Less technique, more speed: this doesn't seem to be the right approach for Swiss Athletics either, as Philipp Bandi, Head of Competitive Sports at the association, told Blick: "We think it's important and right that athletics continues to develop and that new formats are tested in our sport. In this specific case, however, we are skeptical as to whether this will make the competitions more exciting and fairer."
In addition to questions of excitement and fairness, there are also questions of feasibility. Who can afford the cameras for measuring the zone jumps? This may be the case at top meetings or international title competitions, but after that it will soon be over. Switching to zone jump would not be easy, even if you wanted to.
