#USATF Championships: Ashton Eaton Jumps Toward Decathlon Olympic Gold Medal Defense

Ashton Eaton’s 2016 Olympic decathlon gold medal quest starts in earnest this week at the USATF Championships in Eugene at Hayward Field, even though he’s not competing in the decathlon.

The Bend, Oregon native and University of Oregon graduate, you may recall, broke the decathlon world record during the 2012 Olympic Trials at Hayward and then sailed to gold in London. Eaton’s goal, publicly stated or not, is to defend his gold in Rio next year and then try to become the first man to win three straight decathlon golds in 2020.

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2020 can’t happen if 2016 doesn’t, so Eaton’s goal since 2012 has been to improve his weakest decathlon events. Those are, he readily admits, the throws- discus, javelin and shot put.

The most important muscles in the throws are not the arm muscles, as conventional wisdom will tell you, but the legs. The key to those events is to be able to push off like a coiled spring. This is why Eaton concentrated on the 400-meter hurdles last season (where he ended up ranked 6th in the world by Track and Field News) and for the first half of this year, the long jump.

At the 2012 Olympic Trials his decathlon long jump would have been good enough for him to make London as a long jumper. This week he’ll be at Hayward only competing in the long jump (the finals are Thursday, the first day of competition).

Feb 14, 2015; New York, NY, USA; Ashton Eaton (USA), right, and coach Harry Marra at the 108th Millrose Games at Armory. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

His results will tell him- and us- an awful lot about how his choice to concentrate on improving his leg muscles has worked out. He and his main coach, Harry Marra, are breaking new ground here. Two other men have won two consecutive decathlon golds- Bob Mathias of the US in 1948 and 1952, and the UK’s Daley Thompson in 1980 and 1984. Mathias won gold at age 18 and 22 but he retired because at the time no athlete was allowed to make money in “amateur” athletics, so once he was out of college he could not afford training. Thompson won at ages 22 and 26 but injuries in between resulted in a 4th place finish in 1988.

Those men- like many others- continued to compete in the decathlon even in non-Olympic years. Eaton, after winning worlds easily in 2013, has not completed a decathlon since. Quests, as any knight will tell you, take a long time. As soon as 2012 was over, Eaton and Marra began planning and training for 2016 and beyond.

If Eaton does well in the long jump this week- some say he even has a chance to win it- and follows it up with a win at the World Championships in Beijing later this summer, then everything is on track for 2016, and even 2020. Next summer? Eaton is already thinking about five years from now. But it all starts this week. One jump at a time.