Neugebauer Scores 8,836 Points With Seven Personal Bests And Rises To Global Contender
By David Woods for DyeStat
Kirby Lee/Image of Sport
AUSTIN, Texas – In doing what he had never done before, what no collegiate decathlete had ever done before, what no German had ever done before, Leo Neugebauer felt something he had never felt before.
With his body at its fittest, he had an out-of-body experience.
At the NCAA Division 1 Championships on Thursday, he cleared a pole vault bar set at 17 feet, 1 inch (5.21 meters). Then he shouted, knocking over a folding chair upon exiting the pit and running nearly 100 meters down the back stretch of his home Texas track at Mike A. Myers Stadium.
The running was there for all to see. Not as visible were the tears running down his cheeks. It was, Neugebauer said, the most emotional moment of his life.
He knew he had won. He knew he was in the middle of something memorable.
“I ran away because I couldn’t even control my body,” Neugebauer said. “I just wanted to take off. There was a tear or two involved. That just shows how much that means to me.”
Neugebauer’s decathlon score – 8,836 points, a collegiate and German record and enough to have won last year’s world title – will reverberate from Austin to Eugene to Berlin to Budapest. He set personal bests in seven of 10 events.
The 22-year old is a promising young decathlete no more. He is a contender for gold medals at August’s World Championships in Hungary and at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen in Budapest,” he said, “but it’s going to be crazy.”
Also crazy: Neugebauer calculated it would take a collegiate record to win.
“If it was me or Kyle,” he said.
That would be Georgia’s Kyle Garland, who finished second with 8,630 points.
Consider no college decathlete other than the 23-year-old Garland – whose previous record of 8,720 was set last year – and Neugebauer have scored as many as 8,630. Not even Oregon’s Ashton Eaton, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, did so.
“We just have a great, great future ahead of us,” Garland said. “It’s super exciting to see how him and me are going to fare over the next 10-12 years, or however many years we’re in this sport.”
Day 2 started most auspiciously for Garland, who set a decathlon collegiate record of 13.54 seconds in the 110-meter hurdles. That yielded a 52-point lead.
From there, the German accelerated like Formula 1…
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