Burkina Faso’s Hugues Fabrice Zango became the first athlete to triple jump over 18 metres indoors with a 18.07m effort in Aubiere, France.
The 27-year-old’s effort breaks the 17.92m indoor world record set by his French coach Teddy Tamgho in 2011.
Zango, who won world bronze behind the USA’s Christian Taylor and Will Claye in 2019, hopes to win his country’s first Olympic medal in Tokyo this year.
Zango combines his sport with studying electrical engineering at university.
He is based at a university in Bethune, close to Lille, in northern France.
Britain’s Jonathan Edwards holds the outdoor triple jump world record with a leap of 18.29m in Gothenburg in 1995.
Tamgho tweeted that “we knew the record must fall” after Zango’s jump, adding “now we go back to work because we must not stop there”.
Zango’s current outdoor best is 17.66m set in 2019. His coach Tamgho is one of only six men, including Edwards, Taylor and Claye, to jump over 18 metres outdoors.
