In Ramona, Oklahoma, where, Midwestern poets say, the wind comes sweeping across the prairie and kicking up dust from abandoned oil fields, Mykolas Alekna made Sunday afternoon planned, early Monday morning in Spain, a two-kilogram disk farther than anyone in history, reaching 74.35 meters. He thus erased, like the wind that erases the roads, the oldest world record in men’s athletics, the one that the East German Jürgen Schult had set, indelible as if written in stone, on June 6, 1986, at 74, 08 meters.
The record route, 27 centimeters in almost 38 years, is a journey that symbolizes the cultural revolution that athletics has experienced in the last four decades. A journey that brings excellence to the United States from the old dominions of the East, the kingdom of anabolic drugs and state doping, a marvel of technique as well, still present in the ranking with the hammer world record (86.74 meters) that the Ukrainian Yuriy Sedykh beat on August 30, 1986 and is now the oldest.
Mykolas Alekna is a giant Lithuanian (two meters, 110 kilos) and very young, 21 years and 200 days old, educated in recent years with the Golden Bears of the University of California at Berkeley, where he studies psychology and with whom he breaks not only records of distance, but also records for precocity in a specialty in which age, muscular maturity, and experience usually prevail. Mykolas is an athlete still in training who arrives burning stages. At 19 years old, in Munich 2022, he was the youngest European champion in history; at 23, silver in Eugene, Oregon, the youngest medalist in a World Cup. A gale even stronger than that of the parched prairies of Oklahoma, which carries away thistles and old wooden cabins and which pitchers from all over the world seek to achieve their best marks. Pure physics and aeronautics: thrown against the wind the disc maintains the gyroscopic movement on its axis at a higher speed than the linear movement and continues to advance after having reached its peak Three days before the Lithuanian prodigy, the Cuban Yaimé Pérez caught the best wind and threw the discus up to 73.09 meters, the best world mark in the last 35 years.
His journey to the record began perhaps in the genes of his father Virglijus Alekna, now 52 years old, driver and bodyguard of the Lithuanian president in his time, double Olympic champion and double world champion in discus throwing who until yesterday held the record of his country and the second best world mark in history (73.88 meters). Sending his youngest son (the eldest, Martynas, is also a discus thrower, but more modest, only 67 meters) to a Californian university, he chose a change of school and throwing philosophy that the new record holder’s coach Mo Saatara explains like a master. of dance can explain how to teach a bear to dance the chotis. “He is a very explosive athlete. Super, his coordination is great. He has a lot of throwing power and his throwing… I don’t know, there aren’t many people on earth who can do that, who have that ability,” Saatara recently said in the magazine Track and field news. “Our concern is the technique, not the marks, and the technique, the rhythm, progresses very well. He already knows the positional points to hit and knows how to move the puck, now it’s about rhythm, how to get the highest speed and inertia to maximize his strength.”
Saatara talks about rhythm and speed like Cuban technicians and in a way despises brute force, muscle. Mykolas’s father was the same height, two meters, but in shape he weighed 20 kilos more, 130. “I’m not a fan of pushing things too much. I think if you start putting too much pressure on athletes, and especially in strength development, you start to get into risky things. Mykolas is very, very young for the puck, and over time he will get stronger, more powerful and things like that, but before we do anything, we always ask ourselves: Does it help the launch or is it detrimental? Does it help the most important thing, the preparation for the Paris Games?” says Saatara. “Maybe he can increase the work with the bats, but is it helping him to be a better pitcher? Maybe I do not know. Maybe a 500-pound bench press or a 700-pound squat might help someone, but I think for the discus, I don’t know if that’s really helpful. The disc only weighs two kilos, how much power do you need? How much maximum force do you need? “I think flexibility and explosiveness, that kind of stuff, is a lot more important to the puck than anything else.”
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