Ralph Boston, Olympian Who Soared Into the Record Books, Dies at 83

Three years later, in Mexico City, Boston, on his way to winning a bronze Olympic medal there, was warming up for a jump when his teammate Bob Beamon leaped an astonishing 29 feet, 2½ inches, shattering Boston’s world record by nearly two feet. (The current record — 29 feet, 4¼ inches — was set by the American Mike Powell in 1991.)

Boston often recalled an encounter he had with a fellow Olympian on a New York City street as the U.S. team was preparing to leave for Rome in 1960.

“He’s got a camera and he says, ‘Ralph Boston, I want to take your picture,’ and he snaps it,” Boston told The Los Angeles Times in 2010. “I said, ‘Who are you?’ And he said, ‘You don’t know me now, but you will. My name is Cassius Marcellus Clay.’”

Ralph Harold Boston was born on May 9, 1939, in Laurel, Miss., about 85 miles southeast of Jackson, to Peter and Eulalia Boston. His mother was a homemaker, his father a railroad fireman who took up farming after losing his right eye in a hunting accident. Ralph, the youngest of 10 children, helped his father in the fields before school.

At Oak Park High School in Laurel, he became a star athlete, setting a national high school record in the 180-yard hurdles. As a biochemistry major at Tennessee State University, he competed in the high jump, sprints, high hurdles and triple jump, along with the long jump.

“I became a long jumper by accident,” he said in an interview in 2015 with a local Mississippi television station. “I wanted to play football, but my mother didn’t like that. In those days, Mama prevailed.”

During the 1960s, he had an intense but friendly rivalry with the Soviet Union’s long jumper Igor Ter-Ovanesyan. At the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Boston was a favorite to repeat as the gold medalist, but the steady rain and strong winds that affected his jumps led to an unexpected upset.