(Reuters) – Venezuela’s Yulimar Rojas broke the 16-year-old world indoor triple jump record when she bounded 15.43 metres at the Madrid World Athletics Indoor Tour meeting on Friday.
The twice world champion set the mark with her final jump, adding seven centimetres to Russian Tatyana Lebedeva’s record which had stood since 2004.
The mark is the second longest women’s triple jump ever, exceeded only by Inessa Kravets’s outdoor world record of 15.50m which the Ukrainian set in 1995.
Rojas, the Olympic silver medallist, broke her South American indoor record with a leap of 15.29m on her fourth attempt and then, after her third foul of the competition, eclipsed the long-standing world record.
(Reporting by Gene Cherry; Additional reporting by Karolos Grohmann; Editing by Ken Ferris)
