Former disgraced athlete makes comeback with a ‘big jump’
LONG jumper Luvo Manyonga (Tuks) jumped an Olympic Games qualifying distance in Pretoria over the weekend as he soared to a mark of 8.20m in a league meeting at Pilditch. The Olympic qualifications standard is 8.15m.
And it’s amazing to think that the former junior world long jump champion’s performance was the first time in more than a year that he officially competed. He achieved his distance on his first jump.
Manyonga, who trains at the High Performance Centre in Pretoria (HPC), jumped into a headwind of 1.5m per second.
Neil Cornelius, his coach, was speechless after Manyonga’s “big jump” and admits he was caught off-guard.
“I could see during the week that he was jumping farther than eight metres which was a good sign. I was hoping that he might jump 8.05m today. That would have been great. To be honest, I thought we still had to do some work for him to jump 8.15m plus.
“But then he had this one perfect jump. He had a good run-up and launched himself into the air with ease and seemingly just flew. He really made it look so easy. When it was announced how far he had jumped I was stumped. It’s moments like this that make it special to be an athletics coach.
“After his jump we immediately decided to call it a day because we were just so surprised. As the coach I was afraid that he might get over-eager and try to improve on his jump of 8.20m.
“It is when an athlete tries to force his technique that there’s a real risk of him getting injured. I wasn’t prepared for him to risk doing that because he had put in a lot of long hard and dedicated hours to fully recover from an ankle injury.”
Manyonga’s performance proves that any adversity can be overcome if an athlete is really committed to undo past mistakes. At the end of 2011, Manyonga was considered as the next real deal in South African athletics, and with good reason. At a meeting in Jamsa, Finland he jumped 8.26m. This made him South Africa’s second best long jumper of all time at that stage.
His performance at that year’s World Championships in Daegu was also impressive as he finished fifth in his first Worlds, with a distance of 8.21m.
The Tuks/HPC athlete’s rise to athletics stardom began in 2010 when he won the world title at the Junior Championships in Moncton, Canada, with a jump of 8.19m. It remains the African and South African Junior record.
In 2012, at the South African Championships, his career spiralled out of control when an announcement was made that he had tested positive for the recreational drug tik and banned for two years.
To make matters worse, his long-time coach, Mario Smit, died in a car accident in 2014, just at the time when Manyonga was making his comeback.
“I can honestly say that I hit rock bottom and my life was living hell after I was banned for using a banned substance. Luckily for me, there came a time when I realised that I was feeling sorry for myself and that it was not helping. The way I was behaving was a definite way to total self-destruction. I talked to some friends and begged them to help me,” Manyonga said last year when he joined Tuks Athletics.
“I have to thank Gideon Sam, the president of Sascoc, who supported me right through my ordeal. He is one of the people who never lost faith in me.”