Vladimir Yashchenko

Vladimir Ilyich Jaschtschenko ( Russian Владимир Ильич Ященко , Ukrainian Volodymyr Illitsch Jaschtschenko / Володимир Ілліч Ященко * 12. January 1959 in Zaporizhia , Ukrainian SSR , † thirtieth November 1999 ) was a Ukrainian high jumper , who competed for the Soviet Union. The 1.93 meter tall and 84 kilogram athlete jumped as a youth and became European champion.

In 1976, Jaschtschenko jumped 2.22 meters and was ranked 22nd on the world's best list of the year. On July 3, 1977 he jumped at the junior international match USA against USSR in Richmond, first with a junior world record of 2.27 meters, then with a European record of 2.31 meters and finally with a world record of 2.33 meters. He improved the Dwight Stones best from the previous year by an inch. Shortly afterwards he was in Donetsk with a 2.30 meter junior European champion.

On March 12, 1978 at the European Indoor Championships in Milan, he improved the indoor world record twice with 2.33 meters and 2.35 meters. He won ahead of Rolf Beilschmidt from the GDR, who had skipped 2.29. This was the last major international competition in which two straddle jumpers were able to place themselves in front of the performers of the Fosbury flop.

On June 16, 1978, Yashchenko improved the world record in Tbilisi to 2.34 meters. At the European Championships , Jaschtschenko won with 2.30 meters in front of the flop jumper Aljaksandr Hryhorjeu , also from the USSR, and Rolf Beilschmidt. In the same year he was voted Europe's Sportsman of the Year .

Shortly after his 20th birthday, Jaschtschenko defended his European indoor championship title with 2.26 meters in front of his team-mate Gennadi Belkow and the German Andre Schneider-Laub . Two weeks after the European Indoor Championships, Yashchenko jumped 2.29 meters indoors in Fort Worth.

After the 1979 indoor season, Yashchenko had an operation on his ankle knee. This ushered in a long series of operations from which he never recovered. In 1983 he jumped another 2.10 meters. After that, the last straddle-style high jump world record holder was forgotten. In 1999 he died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 40 after many years of alcoholism .

literature

• Manfred Holzhausen: world records and world record holder. High jump - long jump. Grevenbroich 1999
• Peter Matthews (Ed.): Athletics 2000. Surbiton 2000, ISBN 1-899807-07-1

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Steven Downes: Obituary: Vladimir Yashchenko. In: independent.co.uk. The Independent , December 8, 1999, accessed August 20, 2018 .