– It was not an ordinary Christmas Saturday night.
Breaking boundaries in the shot put Ryan Crouser immediately goes back half a year in time. Crouser lives in the Pori-sized town of Fayetteville, Arkansas, where he owns a farm.
In a barn found on the farm, Crouser has a ball ring where he practices his technique by pushing an iron ball into a tarp attached to the ceiling. Crouser, 30, is known as a competitor who is constantly improving his technique, having pushed hundreds of thousands of repetitions in his swing.
Last December, however, Crouser felt that he was on the verge of something special.
– One Saturday evening around ten o’clock in the evening, it occurred to me whether I should add a kind of cross step to my work. With its help, I could extend the turning radius of the spin, with which I could get more acceleration, the 201-centimeter and 140-kilogram Crouser remembers.
– When I try new things, the circle usually feels small. Some of the tunings have been promising, but I haven’t felt like I could reproduce the top thrusts consistently. But when I tested the cross step for the first time, the first feeling was wow! Suddenly, the ring felt huge, says Crouser.
Urheilu has asked Crouser for an interview on Monday evening. The reason can be found on Saturday, when the American collected the first fruits of his insight in California. Crouser improved his own world record by 19 cents to 23.56.
What was special about the recent ME push was that it came about as if by accident.
– When I did the previous ME (23.37) in 2021 in the US Olympic qualifiers, I was prepared to push far right there. This result came in the middle of a hard training season, which will continue for weeks, says Crouser.
ME side story
The world record takes on even wilder proportions when you take into account Crouser’s series in California: 23.23 – 23.31 – 22.94 – 23.56 – 22.80 – 22.86.
The average of Crouser’s six pushes was therefore 23.12.
– Evenness warms my heart even more than ME. It tells me that my new technique has raised my base level.
Crouser’s average of 23.12 on the Westwood course is the same as the previous ME man Randy Barnes pushed in 1990 to his model on the same field.
Instead, 33 years ago, Barnes pushed his ME around the inside track of the field, while Crouser broke his record in a ball pit built outside the field, 200 meters behind the starting point.
Crouser says that he was able to choose a push position where the ME-laak could not fit: according to Crouser, the end wall delimiting the competition area was exactly 24 meters from the edge of the ring.
– The organizers asked me two weeks ago if this is really the place where I want to compete. The reason for the inquiry was specifically the wall 24 meters away. I answered that if I push more than 24 meters, then we are talking about a very good problem.
The main goal is World Cup gold
Crouser names defending the World Championship gold he won last year in Eugene as his main goal for the summer. There will be an opportunity for that in August, when Budapest will host the 19th World Championships in athletics history. The goal also has a side plot.
– I want to win gold with my own record, says Crouser.
The reigning Olympic champion and world champion describes his starting situation as tickling the summer. The feeling has been constantly present since the aha experience on Saturday night in December.
– When I had realized that I was on the trail of something significant, I immediately made notes and marked the starting points of my feet on the rink with chalk. I immediately did 15-20 thrusts, which only increased my enthusiasm.
– After Sunday’s rest day, I went to the indoor gym on Monday and finished the workout by doing 10-15 push-ups with my new technique. The results were variable in the beginning, but during the six months I have mainly applied for consistency in my work. Saturday was the first time that all performances stayed together in the race.