An American's Guide to Olympic "Field." There will be no track in here

What could possibly be cooler than Throwing A Thing Really Freakin’ Far, or Jumping Really Freakin’ High?

This is part 10 of RINGS RODGE, an 15-part series where Olympics obsessive and journalist Rodger Sherman breaks down a different sport every day heading up to the 2024 Paris Olympics. You can probably get serious previews of the most popular sports on other sites… here, we’re doing unserious previews of sports that aren’t regularly on TV in between the four years between Olympics. Rodger didn’t really time things right so he’s not going to be able to get to all the sports BUT HE’S GOING TO TRY HIS BEST TO DO AS MANY AS POSSIBLE.

Today: field!

We got multiple shouts to cover “field”—the non-running parts of track and field, so unappreciated that we don’t even really have a good way to refer to them. If you run track, you can simply say “I run track!” and everybody gets it. If you throw the shot put, you have to say“I’m on the track team” or “I’m a thrower” or “I throw the shot put.”

Most of the world, including the IOC, avoids this issue by referring to all these events “athletics.” That’s better, since it’s more inclusive of field—but not enough for me. These brilliant athletes don’t deserve to be lumped in! They deserve their own teams and their own events! But for now, all I can give them is this post.

Why should I care about “Field?”

No athlete gets overlooked more than the jumpers, throwers, and vaulters.

In Paris, you’ll be able to watch the man who can throw a weight farther than anybody in history has ever been able to throw a weight, the woman who can jump higher than anybody who has ever jumped, and the man who can vault his body higher into the air than anybody who has ever vaulted.

Isn’t that incredibly sick? What could possibly be cooler than Throwing A Thing Really Freakin’ Far, or Jumping Really Freakin’ High?

And yet, we cast them to the side. Literally—when I went to the New York Grand Prix last month, the shot put and the high jump were over to the side of the stadium. The long jump/triple jump pit was tucked on the far side of the backstretch, roughly 500 feet away from the grandstand, essentially impossible for any of the fans to watch. These brilliant athletes have to do their events while the track races are being run, making it extremely difficult to pay close attention. Even in combined events like the decathlon and heptathlon which are supposed to highlight athletes capable of succeeding in both track and field, the scoring system is heavilyy weighted so sprinting is more valuable than throwing.

If you watch a track and field broadcast, they’ll show you every step of every track race, and occasionally cut in with some highlights of the field like “uggghhhhh I guess we have to tell you that some absolute unit threw a discus 250 feet” and I always think WAIT WHY WEREN’T YOU SHOWING ME THE UNITS THROWING THE DISCUSES (disci?)?!?!?!?!?! THAT’S MORE INTERESTING THAN THE THIRD HEAT IN THE 110 METER HURDLES IMO!!!!

Admittedly, it’s not great TV. You can always show the finish line in track and be pretty something cool will happen. But the long jump might be won by the fourth jump in a set of six, and the high jump might come down to two jumpers getting tired and failing to clear the bar at a too-high height.

But it’s worth the payoff. When you see an athlete break a world record in a field event, you really feel like you’ve just witnessed somebody pushing the boundaries of what the human body can do.

Are there any GOATs in Paris?

There are six World Record holders competing in field events in Paris, and I guess you could say anybody with a world record is, definitionally, the Greatest Of All Time in that event. But I’m going to focus on three athletes who are clearly GOATed in their event.

The first GOAT here is Swedish pole vaulter Armand Duplantis, who has broken his own world record seven times since 2020. He’s won 29 events in a row, dating back to a Diamond League event in 2022 when he finished second. Mondo winning gold is the lockiest lock in Paris. He can probably go up to 6.3 meters, but he gets a payout every time he breaks the world record, so he’s incentivized to raise the bar literally one centimeter at a time.

Mondo is only 24, so he’s probably going to break the record somewhere between 15 and 30 times by the end of his career. Despite the Swedish uniform, Mondo is a Louisiana boy whose entire family went to LSU. His dad Greg was a pole vaulter, as were his brother Andreas and his sister Johanna; his Swedish mother moved to America to play for LSU’s volleyball team, and his brother Antoine is the all-time hits leader for LSU’s baseball team. They’re going to play the Swedish anthem when he wins, but that man has probably eaten Popeyes 100-plus times—I’m counting it as a win for America.

Our second GOAT is hammer thrower Anita Włodarczyk. (I have looked up how to pronounce “ł” and am no closer to the answer than before I started.) Włodarczyk is the back-to-back-to-back Olympic champion and won four straight World Championships between 2009 and 2017. She’s singlehandedly bumped the world record up over five meters to 82.96 meters. Nobody is really close to catching her—this year, nobody has thrown it over 80 meters. The sixth time she broke her own world record was at the Rio Olympics:

But she’s 38 and hasn’t thrown the hammer over 75 meters since 2022, which may be related to the fact that she “completely severed” her thigh muscle chasing down a guy attempting to steal her car that year. Sprinting isn’t exactly a natural activity to throwers, but it’s gotta be pretty terrifying getting chased down by the greatest hammer thrower of all time. Her odds of going back-to-back-to-back-to-back are slim, but she’s still clearly the best thrower ever.

Our third GOAT is Ryan Crouser. And not just because he’s the world record holder, back-to-back Olympic champ, and back-to-back World Champ. He also used his background in engineering to invent a new technique—the “Crouser Slide”—to break his own world record last May:

Crouser is a true freak athlete: 6-foot-7, 320 pounds, and he allegedly broke a rim dunking in high school. He won high school national championships in shot put, javelin, and discus in high school and a state championship in the triple jump. He was offered a tryout by the Colts and has a 34-inch vert. But he’d rather figure out how to throw a heavy ball as far as the human body can throw it.

Come on, Rodger. Rank the field events.

OK, fine. I hate ranking stuff because people get mad at me. I like all of these events! Well, all of them except for one.

1. Pole vault: Running super fast and using a giant stick to throw your body 20 feet in the air. Hell yeah. Watching somebody do it in slow-mo actually seems impossible.

2. Hammer throw: Spinning around really fast and throwing a big weight attached to a rope. Hell yeah.

3. Javelin: Throwing a big spear 300 feet. Hell yeah. Bumped down the list a bit because every once in a while somebody gets hit by a javelin and dies.

4. High jump: Jumping really high. Hell yeah.

5. Discus: Throwing a metal frisbee 250 feet. Hell yeah.

6. Shot put: Extremely wide people throwing a big stone as far as they can. Hell yeah. It’s all the way down at #6 because shot is so heavy that it doesn’t go very far—obviously very impressive but visually underwhelming.

7. Long jump: An aesthetically pleasing and iconic event, but I cannot abide the overlap with sprinters. We’re here for the true fieldheads, not people who get the glory of winning races and the glory of winning field events. Pick a side!

8. Triple jump. Sorry but “a hop, step, and a jump” doesn’t do it for me. It’s pretty easy for me to imagine why someone might need to jump really high or throw a big weight really far, but I can’t really imagine why someone might need to do two highly specific steps before jumping.

What are some potential field highlights?

Lithuanian Mykolas Alekna just broke the 40-year old discus record by going to a super-windy throwing venue in the famously windy state of Oklahoma.

We’ll see whether he can translate that success when competing in a state that is not the setting of a blockbuster wind-related movie.

Talking about sequels, I can’t wait to see the follow-up to my personal favorite Olympic event of all time—Italy’s Gianmarco Tamberi and Qatar’s Mutaz Essa Barshim deciding to split the gold medal in the high jump instead of going to a tiebreaking jumpoff:

Tamberi is the reigning world champ and the world leader this season, and is favored to win by himself this time.

Which events can Team USA win?

Team USA has medal contenders in the vast majority of field events—let’s start with the locks and work our way down:

• An American should win the men’s shot put. It’s probably going to be Crouser. But every once in a while, he loses to Joe Kovacs, the No. 2 shot putter of all time, who was unfortunately born at the same time and in the same country as the No. 1 shot putter of all time. Kovacs won silver in Rio and Tokyo, but beat Crouser for gold at the 2019 world championships. There’s a possibility of a Team USA sweep, as Payton Otterdahl has the fourth-best distance in the world this year—it happened in the 2022 World Championships in Eugene. What can I say, we’re a shot putting country.

• Valarie Allman should win the women’s discus. She won in Tokyo and had the longest throws of the year in 2022 and 2023. Fellow American Laulaga Tausaga won last year’s World Championships, but Tausaga won’t be in Paris after a disastrous performance at the Olympic trials where she failed to register any legal throws, curling the discus all the way onto the running track.

• Chase Jackson is favored to win the women’s shot put. Jackson has won the last two world championships. WHAT CAN I SAY. WE’RE A SHOT PUTTING COUNTRY. Jackson is from Los Alamos, New Mexico, so she surely had plenty of access to brilliant physicists who could help design the optimal shot put form. 2020 silver medalist Raven Saunders is also headed to Paris, having swapped out the Joker masks they wore at the Tokyo Olympics for Hulk masks.

• An American can win the women’s hammer throw, but the team could probably be better. In 2023, Americans had six of the eight longest throws in the world, but Team USA is made up of the throwers with the third, seventh, and 13th longest throws. Brooke Andersen, the 2022 World Champ and world leader in each of the last three seasons, fouled out of Olympic trials after having the best throw of the meet in the qualifying round. (Why don’t the throws from the qualifying round carry over to the final? I don’t know, and I’m mad about it!) We are sending DeAnna Price, the 2019 world champion and 2023 bronze medalist, and she has a great shot at gold. We’re rooting for a strong performance from Ohio’s Annette Echikunwoke, who now competes on Team USA after a mishap at the Tokyo Olympics where she was disqualified and sent home because the Nigerian committee didn’t conduct enough doping tests before the Olympics.

• Tara Davis-Woodhall can win the women’s long jump. She’s won every event she’s competed in this year including the indoor World Championship, but has yet to go head-to-head with Germany’s Malaika Mahimbo, the reigning Olympic champ and world leader.

• Chris Nilsen or Sam Kendricks should medal in the men’s pole vault. They’re fifth and seventh all-time… which means they’re buried below dozens upon dozens of better jumps by Mondo. Everybody’s fighting for silver.

• Juvaughn Harrison could medal in the high jump. Harrison made headlines for competing in both the high jump and the long jump in Tokyo—the first American to do so since Jim Thorpe in 1912—but decided to focus on high jump this time around. He won the silver at last year’s world champs and has the third-best jump in the world this year.

I don’t expect Team USA to medal in men’s long jump, triple jump, discus, javelin, or hammer, or the women’s high jump, triple jump, javelin, or hammer—we don’t have any of the top 5 performers in 2024 in any of those categories. And field performances tend to be somewhat static in that you don’t suddenly become significantly stronger on the eve of a big event—either you can throw the thing far or you can’t. (I’m saying this as motivation. Prove me wrong! Grow massive muscles and huck that javelin farther than anybody’s ever hucked one before!!!)