The men's

triple jump The triple jump, sometimes referred to as the hop, step and jump or the hop, skip and jump, is a track and field event, similar to the long jump. As a group, the two events are referred to as the "horizontal jumps". The competitor runs down th ...

at the 1952 Olympic Games took place on 23 July at the

Helsinki Olympic Stadium The Helsinki Olympic Stadium ( fi, Helsingin Olympiastadion; sv, Helsingfors Olympiastadion), located in the Töölö district about from the centre of the Finnish capital Helsinki, is the largest stadium in the country, nowadays mainly used f ...

. Thirty-five athletes from 23 nations competed. The maximum number of athletes per nation had been set at 3 since the 1930 Olympic Congress. Brazilian athlete

Adhemar da Silva Adhemar Ferreira da Silva (September 29, 1927 – January 12, 2001) was a Brazilian triple jumper. He won two Olympic gold medals and set four world records, the last being 16.56 metres in 1955 Pan American Games. In his early career he also ...

won the gold medal, breaking the world record twice. It was Brazil's first medal and first victory in the men's long jump. All three of the nations represented on the podium were relatively new to the event in the Olympics; Brazil had sent triple jumpers in 1948 (including da Silva), but the Soviet Union (

Leonid Shcherbakov Leonid Mikhailovich Shcherbakov (russian: Леонид Михайлович Щербаков, born 7 April 1927) is a Russian retired triple jumper who won a silver medal at the 1952 Olympics. He broke the world record in 1953 and won the Europ ...

's silver) and Venezuela (

Asnoldo Devonish Asnoldo Vicente Devonish Romero (June 15, 1932 – January 1, 1997) was a Venezuelan track and field athlete who won the first Olympic medal for his native country. At the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, he finished third in the Men's Trip ...

's bronze) each won medals in their first appearance.

Background

This was the 12th appearance of the event, which is one of 12 athletics events to have been held at every Summer Olympics. Returning finalists from the 1948 Games were gold medalist

Arne Åhman Per Arne Åhman (4 February 1925 – 5 July 2022) was a Swedish athlete who won the triple jump event at the 1948 Summer Olympics The 1948 Summer Olympics (officially the Games of the XIV Olympiad and also known as London 1948) were an int ...

of Sweden, fourth-place finisher Preben Larsen of Denmark, fifth-place finisher Geraldo de Oliveira of Brazil, sixth-place finisher Valle Rautio of Finland, and eighth-place finisher

of Brazil. The last of these, da Silva, had been very successful in the intervening four years; he tied the world record in 1950 and broke it in 1951, as well as winning the Pan American championship. He was "co-favorite" with European champion

of the Soviet Union. Belgium, Egypt, Ghana, Puerto Rico, Saar, the Soviet Union, and Venezuela each made their first appearance in the event. The United States competed for the 12th time, having competed at each of the Games so far.

Competition format

The competition used the two-round format introduced in 1936. In the qualifying round, each jumper received three attempts to reach the qualifying distance of 14.55 metres; if fewer than 12 men did so, the top 12 (including all those tied) would advance. In the final round, each athlete had three jumps; the top six received an additional three jumps, with the best of the six to count.Official Report, pp. 314–14.

Records

Prior to this competition, the existing world and Olympic records were as follows.

jumped further than his own world record four times: 16.12 in the second jump in the final round, 16.09 in the fourth, 16.22 in the fifth, and 16.05 in the sixth.

Schedule

All times are

Eastern European Summer Time Eastern European Summer Time (EEST) is one of the names of the UTC+03:00 time zone, which is 3 hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time. It is used as a summer daylight saving time in some European and Middle Eastern countries, which makes it ...

(

UTC+3 UTC+03:00 is an identifier for a time offset from UTC of +03:00. In areas using this time offset, the time is three hours later than the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Following the ISO 8601 standard, a time with this offset would be wri ...

)

Results

Qualifying

Those achieving the qualifying performance of 14.55 metres advanced to the final.

Final

FOTO-1-Acto-de-premiación-del-salto-triple-en-1952

Devonish was injured and did not jump after the second round.

References

External links

Official Olympic Report
''la84.org''.
International Association of Athletics Federations: Brazil's Two-Time Olympic Champion Adhemar Ferreira da Silva Passes Away
{{DEFAULTSORT:Athletics at the 1952 Summer Olympics - Men's triple jump Athletics at the 1952 Summer Olympics Triple jump at the Olympics Men's events at the 1952 Summer Olympics