The high jump that finally cleared eight feet

On July 29, 1989, Cuba's Javier Sotomayor cleared 2.44 meters at the Central American and Caribbean Championships in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was the first high jump clearance of eight feet, and it won him the gold medal. 1

The number was only one centimeter higher than the previous 2.43-meter world record, credited to Sweden's Patrik Sjöberg in Stockholm in 1987. But 2.44 meters did something the previous mark did not: it put a human being on the other side of a neat, memorable imperial barrier. 2

The jump happened at San Juan's Sixto Escobar Stadium, a compact venue built in 1936 and later used during the 1979 Pan American Games. World Athletics calls it an unlikely setting for the first eight-foot high jump. Sotomayor's leap also added a centimeter to the 2.43-meter mark he had set at the World Indoor Championships in Budapest four months earlier. 1

The result was not a barely successful scrape over the bar. Sotomayor won the competition by 18 centimeters, according to a later sports retrospective, with Troy Kemp taking silver. 3

Sotomayor won Olympic gold in Barcelona in 1992. The next year, in Salamanca, Spain, he raised the world record to 2.45 meters. That mark is still listed as the men's high jump world record, making the San Juan jump both the first eight-footer and the second-highest clearance in the event's history. 4 5

July 29's oddity is the combination of threshold and setting. Sotomayor cleared a measurement that had been waiting to become a headline, did it in a Caribbean stadium rather than at the Olympics, and then left the record book with only one more centimeter to give.