The Long Jump Ahead

Three-time Olympic gold medalist Tianna Bartoletta’s dreams for the 2020 Games were derailed by injury, illness, and the global pandemic. Now, she’s ready to defend her title.

- By Lindsay Tucker

On a sunny Friday afternoon during the last weekend in February, before stay-at-home orders and facemasks and furloughs, I watched three-time gold medalist Tianna Bartoletta practice the long jump at UC Berkeley’s Edwards Stadium. The YTT-200’s focus was as sharp as the spikes on her shoes as she sprinted down the track and sprung into the air, seemingly weightless, before softly making contact with the sandpit. The key, she told me, is accelerating into the takeoff instead of slowing down to jump. “You gotta be crazy,” she says. “You gotta feel the fear and do it anyway.”

It’s a sentiment Bartoletta, who took home two gold medals from Rio in 2016 (long jump and 4x100-meter relay), has experienced before, particularly during the lows that have punctuated her successful 15-year track and field career. She won her first world championship in the long jump in 2005, the summer after her sophomore year in college, but didn’t earn her second until a decade later.

The latest example of Bartoletta’s fear-be-damned mentality was starting to train for this past June’s Olympic trials in February—by her own account, five months too late. An ankle injury and emergency surgery derailed her 2019 season and kept her off the track until the week before we met. She was only just easing back into her limited training schedule of sprinting, jumping, and weight-training sessions three to four times per week.