2023 Deji’s Doodles #13: Crouser breaks his Shot Put record, Kerley reigns supreme in Rabat, and Tsegay runs staggering time in Rabat

Crouser breaks his Shot Put record, Kerley reigns supreme in Rabat, and Tsegay runs staggering time in Rabat.

Another weekend, another tale of Track and Field stories to digest. One Continental Tour Gold in Los Angeles and the second Diamond League meeting in Rabat threw up plenty of storylines but we’ve selected a few that took us aback as we begin to reach the middle of the outdoor season. 

Certainly, Ryan Crouser’s world record was the peak of the bunch, having broken his own world record, World record holder in the women’s 100m Hurdles Tobi Amusan falters once again, and Fred Kerley proved to the world why he’s the reigning world champion as he took the men’s 100m in Rabat. 

Ryan Crouser is in his own world; we are just living in it. 

How does one begin to decipher an athlete like Ryan Crouser? The American keeps giving us many reasons to ask about the limits of the human body. Granted, the men’s Shot Put isn’t as glamorous as Usain Bolt running fasting than everyone else or maybe even Mondo Duplantis vaulting to heights beyond human imagination, but if there is one man that has made the event look very alluring, it has to be this giant of a specimen. 

At the 2023 Los Angeles Grand Prix, which was this season’s sixth World Athletics Continental Tour Gold meeting, Crouser, who usually goes about his business like a herder tending his sheep. The American took down his world record from 2021 and threw a big mark of 23.56m. In the grand scheme of things, this ranks up there as one of the greatest performances in the history of the sport. He had a competition score of 1334. For context, Bolt scored 1356 when he broke the world record in Berlin in 2009. 

In the span of 18 months, Crouser has broken the world record twice. Typically, you rarely see such in elite athletics. What is more common is for an athlete to reach his/her peak, break a record and most likely stagnate or have a drop of in results. It’s human nature, really. The innate need to feel complacent. After all, in a sport like athletics, success is mostly measured by titles won at the world championships or Olympics. As they say, records can be taken down by anyone at any time in history. 

But for Crouser, the need for more water to quench his thirst continues, which has spurred him on to his latest achievement. He has…