Taylor stitches golden hat-trick
DOHA: This has almost become nothing but a formality: Crowning Christian Taylor as the world triple-jump champion.
Taylor captured his third straight title at the world championships. But the American standout certainly made this one entertaining. Fouling on his first two attempts and staring at elimination, he turned back into the Taylor of old to win the event over teammate and good friend Will Claye in a back-and-forth contest. Taylor’s winning leap was 17.92 metres, with Claye just 0.18 metres behind.
Taylor may be going for another three-peat next summer in Tokyo as he chases his third straight Olympic gold medal.
“Really my goal was to be a one-time world champion, onetime Olympic champ,” said Taylor, who’s now won four of the last five world titles. “Everything else is icing on the cake. Now four times — it makes me feel old.”
It was just business as usual for Taylor in an event where the competitor tries to jump as far as possible by performing a hop, step, and a jump from a running start. All he needed was a little pep talk Sunday to get back on track. “I said, ‘You belong here. Just slow down, relax and don’t touch the board’,” he recounted.
He took his own advice to heart. On his fifth attempt of six, he turned in his best jump of the evening.
Was that drama enough? He said he’s heard whispers about possibly taking the event off the Diamond League competition schedule, just to make the program more condensed.
“This is what we need to keep the triple jump alive,” Taylor said. “Hopefully the IAAF saw this, recognised that it was good for the fans. Hopefully, we had a big enough bang that that IAAF says, ‘We’ll keep you guys’.”
Just don’t ask him if winning ever gets old. “No. No, no, no, no,” the 29-year-old Taylor said. “It’s not boring for me.”