Abused, expelled, orphaned at eight months: how athlete Bob Beamon beat the odds – and became a legend

Lot number 11 in Christie’s “Exceptional Sale” earlier this year lived up to its billing. This was the holy grail for the well-heeled sports fan or history buff – Olympic glory in the palm of your hand.

In an auction that included a Louis XIV tapestry and what was believed to be the only painting by all four of the Beatles, the long-jump gold medal from the 1968 Summer Olympics fetched £351,000. What made its owner give it up? “I had just gotten past the idea of storing it in a bank vault,” says Bob Beamon. “I also thought, with the flags all over the world about to go up for the Paris Games, it was time to cash in on my reputation and inspire the public again.”

As rare collectibles go, Beamon’s gold still dazzles. The clear favourite in 1968, Beamon’s 8.9-metre jump obliterated the world record. Welshman Lynn Davies, the defending Olympic champion, who finished eight spots behind Beamon on that extraordinary day at Estadio Olímpico Universitario told Beamon afterwards: “You have destroyed this event.”

The American weekly magazine Sports Illustrated pronounced Beamon’s jump one of the five greatest sports moments of the 20th century, above Bannister’s four-minute mile. “They never really showed videos of his jump until years later,” says John Carlos, the 200m bronze medalist in 1968. “What they showed was a still picture of him up in the air.”

It was dubbed “the leap of the century” and inspired a new superlative: Beamonesque. “I got a call from Webster’s saying, ‘We put your name in the dictionary, and it means outstanding, unbelievable,’” Beamon recalls.

“I never even had a library card. To be an athlete and have your name in the dictionary describing the things you’ve done: it’s just as great as winning a gold medal.”

His golden leap endured in the record books for nearly 23 years, until the American Mike Powell beat it by 5cm at the 1991 world championships. Beamon’s long jump is still the longest ever at the Olympics.

Just as improbably, Beamon captured the American imagination as popular attention was divided between the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war – battles that Carlos and 200m champion Tommie Smith called further attention to on the podium. At his own medal ceremony, Beamon wore black socks in solidarity with their gloved-fist protest. After getting kicked out of college for protesting about racism, Beamon had intended to play it safe. But that turned out to be harder than he had realised.

Being so far in front made Beamon’s a lonely trail. He didn’t have family or friends to cheer him on at the Olympics. He had to accept that he had reached his athletic peak at the age of 22. What’s more, like many Black American luminaries of the day, Beamon was forced to reconcile racism at home with respect abroad – which also had its limits. “They’d whistle and yell and even boo,” Carlos recalled of the meets when Beamon didn’t jump over the sand pit. “It was difficult for Bob. Here’s a guy that was just thrust into fame. Everybody coming at him – you’d be a little guarded, too.”

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On a video call from his home in the South Carolina resort town of Myrtle Beach, Beamon, 77, looks fit and focused. At first he seems reserved – before Beamon was a byword for athletic excellence, Carlos called him by a different name: the Aristocrat. “He’s a fun-loving guy, just kinda withdrawn. Not one to jump out there if he doesn’t know you. That type of energy.”

After about an hour or so, he lets his guard down just enough to lob out the odd wry barb. “I don’t feel like I missed anything,” he says when I ask him if there’s such a thing as being too reserved. “I mean, I missed a couple parties. I’m not a party guy, so it wasn’t a big deal for me.”

This comes from a guy who carved out a successful post-jump career as a jazz drummer, playing alongside a slew of Grammy award-winning artists. Earlier this year, he released an album with Brooklyn-based producer Stix Bones called Olimpik Soul. “The first time I met Max was at a downtown studio in Manhattan,” he says, casually referencing his chance meeting with renowned drummer Max Roach back in the day. “He was playing with some other greats: Roy Brooks, Joe Chambers, Freddie Waits. Together, they were called the M’Boom ensemble group. It had an incredible effect on me.”

Beamon started out in South Jamaica, in the New York borough of Queens, as a beatnik, filling his school notebooks with freehand sketches and playing the drums for a local dance school. (“I had to give it up because of sports,” he says.) Art was an escape from the harsh realities of home. As Beamon tells it, he was the product of an extramarital affair that began while his parents were being treated for tuberculosis. His father died about a fortnight before he was born in 1946; his mother died when he was eight months old. Shortly after, streptomycin, the first TB antibiotic, became widely available. “That was, as they call it, a bummer,” says Beamon. “As the years go by, you just say: why didn’t they find a cure in 1943? In 1944?”

Beamon’s stepfather was by all accounts an abusive drunk who terrorised his wife and children until it landed him in prison, forcing young Bob to live with his grandmother, Bessie, in the notorious Jamaica Houses council estates – a major seeding ground for New York’s drugs era. “LSD and heroin had taken the lives of so many people,” Beamon recalls. “My family, my brothers, stepbrothers. Just caused a lot of sadness and grief.”

Beamon, too, appeared headed for disaster, joining a gang as a teen. He was expelled for inadvertently striking a teacher in a schoolyard fight and slapped with an assault and battery charge. In lieu of jail time, however, he was sent to a school for juvenile delinquents – where, among other things, he learned how to read when he wasn’t borrowing shoes to compete in athletics meets.

Larry Ellis, the legendary New York City track coach, discovered Beamon at Jamaica High. He didn’t seem a serious prospect, initially. “I wanted to be a Globetrotter,” says Beamon, referring to the exhibition basketball team from Harlem. “I tried just about every running event and either came in last or didn’t finish at all. It was a very disappointing time until one guy got sick and couldn’t compete in the long jump. They let me take his place. My first jump was 19ft [5.7 metres]. I won. They gave me a medal. That was the beginning.”

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In 1965, he set city and state marks in the long jump, broke the triple jump national record and further distinguished himself at the Penn Relays as the outstanding competitor in the high school division. That led to Texas Western (now the University of Texas at El Paso), the college that had just made history by beating uber-white Kentucky in the 1967 NCAA basketball championship. That same year, Beamon won the AAU indoor high jump title and finished second at the Pan Am Games.

It looked as if he’d cruise into Mexico City. But then, a week after Martin Luther King was assassinated, Beamon banded together with his teammates ahead of a meet against the Latter-day Saints school Brigham Young to protest against what they characterised as the Book of Mormon’s racist teachings. “It was a very sad and dark time,” says Beamon, recalling how he was radicalised during this period of national tumult. “I became aware of the Ku Klux Klan and other racial outbursts. Black people were becoming more aware, especially of who we were as individuals. We started wearing afros, talking about Black power, Black pride, Black is beautiful.”

Beamon’s stand cost him his scholarship, and momentum. At the US trials, he barely made the cut. “He lost the concept of the long jump,” Carlos says. “I told him: ‘A plane doesn’t back out from the port and creep down the runway. It revs its engine. As a human being, you gotta get psyched up – and then when you start down the runway, you have to run with speed in order to hit the board and be able to get the height.’ So my thing was to work with him on his speed, and then when I felt he was strong enough, I told him to get with [US coach and fellow jumper] Ralph Boston to get his steps down.”

After those intense workouts, Beamon wasn’t just beaming again. “I probably could have competed in the 100m or 200m,” he says.

By the time the Olympics came around, it was October – the event pushed back to avoid Mexico’s rainy summer season. But that didn’t stop the drops from falling on Estadio Olímpico Universitario for the long jump competition. Beamon’s day could have easily ended in another washout. He nearly missed the finals after fouling on his first two qualifying jumps. After aiming his launch a few inches short of the line, Beamon cleared 8.19 metres to advance, good for second place between Boston and Davies. Then a curious thing happened in the final as Beamon prepared for his next jump. “As soon as he got to the takeoff point,” Carlos recalls, “the rain stopped. The sky opened up the sunshine. It was almost spiritual, man.”

With a few gentle rocks, Beamon eased down the runway in a long, upright stance, pogoed into thin air and hung there as the crowd held its breath. A roar broke out when he finally touched down in the sand pit, well outside the range of an optical device that had been trotted out to precisely log all the jumps. Ultimately, the judges were forced to break out their old measuring tapes. When the mark of 8.9 metres appeared on the scoreboard, Beamon, a product of the imperial system, had no idea what that meant. When he was finally told that he had jumped 29ft 2 1/4in, and had broken the world record by almost 2ft, he collapsed from shock and had to be helped back to his feet by his teammates.

Before Beamon’s golden attempt, the long jump world record had been broken 13 times since 1901. An increase of more than 15cm was thought to be superhuman. It took 12 more years for another jumper to crack even 28ft. “I didn’t go in to really break records,” Beamon says. “I went in to win first place. I could not take my eye off the prize.”

The landing could have been softer. Within hours of winning Olympic gold, Beamon was back in class at El Paso. No parade. No welcome wagon. No nothing. “I walked into class and they said, ‘Open your book to page one,’” he says.

Without warning, he hung up his jumping cleats just before the Munich Olympics in 1972. “People were saying, You need to go back . But what for? I had already proven that I’ve done something, that I’ve won a gold medal in the long jump. Now I needed to transition into something that, to me, would be just as exciting.”

Beamon’s original dream of playing professional basketball died after an unsuccessful tryout for the ABA’s San Diego Conquistadors. So he did PR for a savings-and-loans company, coached a bit, mentored kids and did some fundraising for the US Olympic committee in the 80s. “I attempted to make some comebacks,” he says, “but I just could not get that same aggressiveness. Standing up on the podium and receiving that gold medal, I asked myself while I was up there, Where do I go from here ?”

Once Beamon circled back to the beatnik hobbies he had sacrificed – the drawing, the drumming – it was easier to let his sporting career go. But other aspects of his past still haunted him. So, in 2018, with support from his wife, Rhonda, Beamon submitted to a genealogy study and discovered his birth father’s identity. What’s more, he says with pride, “I found out that I have an older sister and brother, a whole bunch of nieces and nephews and cousins. I’m on cloud nine. It’s truly a blessing.”

His Olympic triumph is just one in a lifetime of achievements that Beamon can share with them now. It’s just a shame he couldn’t keep his gold medal in the family. Ultimately, it proved to be worth more than four times as much as the Louis XIV rug in Christie’s Exceptional Sale. But given the medal’s estimated value – £500,000, tops – the buyer still got a bargain. Too good a bargain, if you ask Carlos. “It was like no other award,” he says. “I think it should have passed down to his family, went to his kids and their kids and so forth. I didn’t like the money. $450,000, after you pay taxes and the [auction] house and attorney’s fees: it’s like you gave it away. But he made his decision.”

As for Beamon, his medal might be gone – to an “important” collector, he assures me – but the thing he accomplished will for ever stay with him. “Jesse Owens had one of his medals sell for $1.5m,” Beamon says. “But the auction was a reminder that there’s a great story behind this great man. I just thought: you know, I had a great story, too.”

• This article was amended on 15 July 2024 because an earlier version erroneously referred to Texas Western being a historically Black college.