Watch Sam Watson Set a New Speed World Record!
Tuesday was a day of many records in the Speed seeding and elimination event, with Bassa Mawem’s 2021 Olympic speed record (5.45 seconds) falling in the very first race and then falling again and again throughout the day. (The entire field, Mawem included, has gotten far faster in the past three years.) But then something bigger happened: Indonesia’s Veddriq Leonardo tied USA’s Sam Watson’s world-record time of 4.79 seconds—a record that Watson established at the IFSC World Cup in this past April, besting a 4.90 second record previously set by… you guessed it: Veddriq Leonardo.
But Watson, apparently, doesn’t like to share. Just minutes after Leonardo’s run, Watson—who was pitted in the elimination round against his teammate Zach Hammer—took four seconds off his own shared time and set a blistering new world record (and Olympic record) of 4.75 seconds.
As John Burgman noted in his longer-form writeup about the event, “The crowd went wild, and Watson himself was understandably ecstatic. Yet, the best part was a congratulatory embrace that Watson received from Hammer at the bottom of the route. It was an Olympic moment of American sportsmanship that will forever live in highlight reels, and rightly so.”
Watch his race on NBC’s YouTube Channel for free.
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