Rising long jumper aims for mark 'no one can touch'
Indoor champs favorite Davis-Woodhall is bubbly, gregarous and 'dialed in'
On the surface, the Tara Davis-Woodhall who is undefeated in the women’s long jump this indoor season appears to be the same athlete who won a silver medal in last year’s World Athletics Championships in Budapest, Hungary.
She still has a smile that lights up a room.
She is still highly animated while she competes — often dancing and singing to herself between jumps — and she always plays to the crowd before and after each of her attempts. She unleashes a celebratory yell when she gets off a big effort, no change there.
But underneath her bubbly, gregarious exterior, the 24-year-old American has become more contemplative about her goals in the event.
She was elated with her second-place finish to Serbian super vet Ivana Vuleta in the World Championships last August but soon realized second place was not where she wanted to stay.
“I always want to be on top and I have to give myself a chance to do that this year,” she said in a telephone interview last week. “I’ve dialed in so much more than I ever have before. That just comes with maturity at my age. But I was saying all offseason that I just have to put something out there so far that no one can touch it. And that’s my plan going into the [outdoor season].”
Her increased focus in training — under the tutelage of University of Arkansas associate head coach Travis Geopfert — has already paid big dividends as she is expected to enter this weekend’s World Athletics Indoor Championships in Glasgow, Scotland, as the favorite in the women’s long jump.
The three-day meet, which consists of daily morning and evening sessions, is scheduled to start at 10:05 a.m. local time (5:05 a.m. Eastern standard time in the U.S.) on Friday with heats of the 60-meter hurdles in the women’s pentathlon and conclude at 9:45 p.m./4:45 p.m. on Sunday with the running of the women’s 1,500-meter final.
The women’s long jump will start at 7:15 p.m./2:15 p.m. on Sunday.
All six sessions of the meet will be broadcast on Peacock in the U.S., with the evening session on Sunday also being shown on CNBC.
Davis-Woodhall won her first two meets of the season with bests of 6.76 meters (22 feet 2¼ inches) and 6.86 (22-6¼). But her dominant performance in the USA Track & Field Indoor Championships in Albuquerque, New Mexico on Feb. 16 stamped her as the favorite in Glasgow as she spanned a personal best — indoors or outdoors — of 7.18 (23-6¾).
The jump was the longest in the world this year by 23 centimeters (nine inches), moved Davis-Woodhall to sixth on the all-time indoor performer list, and came on her fifth of six attempts after Jasmine Moore had pushed her back to second place with a 6.93 (22-9) jump on her fifth try.
“That was one of the biggest jumps I’ve ever had in my entire life,” she said. “I’m super proud of that. I’m a competitor, so I knew when something like that happens, I turn on my competition mode.”
In her first four jumps, Davis-Woodhall was struggling to find her groove and approaching the take-off board too quickly, but she settled down after Moore took the lead.
“I just told myself to relax, just do what you do in practice and everything should go according to plan,” she said. “And what happened was a 718 indoors. That’s a massive jump. I’m excited to see what I can do two Sundays from now.”
Ese Brume of Nigeria, Larissa Iapichino of Italy, and Mikaelle Assani of Germany are expected to be Davis-Woodhall’s biggest challengers in the World indoor meet.
Brume finished second behind Vuleta in the 2022 championships, Iapichino was the top-ranked long jumper in the world last year by Track & Field News, and Assani has the second-longest season best in the field at 6.91 (22-8).
Vuleta, the two-time defending champion, has not jumped indoors this season, and Malaika Mihambo of Germany, the defending Olympic champion and the gold medalist in the 2019 and ’22 World Athletics Championships, is not on the entry list for Glasgow, although she leapt a season best of 6.95 (22-9¾) in winning the ISTAF Indoor meet in Berlin last Friday after winning the national championships five days earlier.
Moore will focus her efforts on the triple jump in Glasgow.
With her jumps of 7.18 (23-6¾) and 7.01 (23-0) in the national championship meet in Albuquerque, this is the fourth consecutive year that Davis-Woodhall has leapt more than seven meters (22-11¾) in the long jump. But like many elite performers, her career path has not been one long upward trajectory. She has had some setbacks to overcome which helped make her the competitor she is today.
Married to Paralympic sprint medalist Hunter Woodhall, she is the youngest of five children born to Ty and Rayshon Davis.
Davis-Woodhall began competing in track and field — in the long jump and sprints — at the age of 4 when Ty was coaching a youth club based in the Dallas suburb of Wylie.
She excelled from the get-go and won the World U18 (under 18) title in the long jump in 2015 and had a stellar prep career at Agoura High School in Agoura Hills after the family moved to Calabasas, California, when she was 11. She produced 10 top-3 finishes in the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) State Championships during her four years there, including a victorious triple in the girls’ 100-meter hurdles, long jump, and triple jump as a senior in 2017.
Later that summer she represented the U.S. in the Pan American U20 Championships in Trujillo, Peru, where she won the long jump and placed second in the 100 hurdles before running a leg on the victorious 400 relay team.
With personal bests of 12.95 seconds in the 100 hurdles, 22-1 (6.73) in the long jump, and 43-4 (13.82) in the triple jump, she concluded her prep career in a three-way tie for fourth on the all-time U.S. national high school performer list in the 100 hurdles, and was third in the long jump and 13th in the triple jump.
Heavily recruited by programs such as Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Texas, UCLA, USC, and Oregon, Davis-Woodhall ultimately chose to attend Georgia but had mixed results while competing for the Southeastern Conference school as a freshman.
She helped the Bulldogs win the team title in the 2018 NCAA indoor championships when she placed third in the long jump and sixth in the 60 hurdles after setting a world U20 record of 7.98 seconds in her qualifying heat. But her performances were not as impressive in the NCAA outdoor meet when she finished fifth in the long jump and was eliminated in the semifinals of the 100 hurdles.
Furthermore, her yearly bests of 13.09 in the hurdles, 6.71 (22-0¼) in the long jump, and 12.89 (42-3½) in the triple jump lagged behind the best marks she had produced at Agoura High as a senior.
That in itself was not a shock, as even the best prep performers sometimes need a season or two to fully adapt to the heavier training loads and stiffer competition at the NCAA Division I level. But Davis-Woodhall had issues with some of the coaching methods of Petros Kuprianou at Georgia and transferred to Texas to work under Longhorn mentor Edrick Floreal.
It took a while for things to come together at Texas as Kuprianou chose not to sign a release that would have allowed Davis-Woodall to compete for the Longhorns during the 2019 season. Therefore, she competed unattached while training under Floreal and attending classes at Texas.
She had a wind-aided best of 6.64 (21-9½) in the long jump that year, and once she was eligible finished second in the 60 hurdles and fourth in the long jump for Texas in the Big 12 Conference indoor meet in February of 2020 before the COVID-19 pandemic cancelled the NCAA indoor championships and the entire outdoor season.
Things finally came together in 2021 as she won the long jump in both the NCAA indoor and outdoor championships, set collegiate records of 6.93 (22-9) indoors and 7.14 (23-5¼) outdoors, and placed sixth in the Olympic Games in Tokyo that had been delayed for a year because of the pandemic.
Due to safety protocols in Japan, the Games were held in a nearly empty stadium in which the only spectators were athletes, coaches, and media members.
“It was actually really hard,” Davis-Woodhall said about the competitive conditions. “My entire version of track and field, and my version of being an athlete is to get excited and to perform in front of people and show them what I can do. And not being able to do that there was definitely a struggle… There was no energy in that building.”
Davis-Woodhall was only a sophomore in regards to her collegiate eligibility during the 2021 season, but she earned her undergraduate degree in Physical Culture and Sports that year and made the decision to sign a professional contract.
“My whole entire life my dream goal was to be a professional athlete,” she said. “Once I was given that opportunity after I had graduated and after I made the Olympic team, that’s what I wanted to do.”
For her parents, a key priority was to see Tara earn a scholarship and secure an education at a good university, said father and former coach Ty. With that achieved, now she could focus on the sport where she said she knew as early as middle school she could be “something special.”
The middle school and high school Tara used to set goals based on all-time age-group and high school lists, Ty said. Today she concerns herself less with rankings and more with enjoying the process of becoming a better version of herself, both in and out of athletics.
“That’s something that she’s adapted to as she’s gotten older,” he said. “When she was younger, she was very focused on certain goals, and we were that way as a family as well. But when you do that, you can miss out on the experience and the journey you’re on because you’re so focused on attaining the goals you have set for yourself.”
Her first year as a professional in 2022 started well as she was victorious in the Millrose Games in New York City and in the Tyson Invitational in Fayetteville, Arkansas, during the indoor season before she placed second in the Mt. San Antonio College Relays in Walnut, California, in April and third in the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene, Oregon, in May.
But disaster struck in the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships four weeks later when she fouled on all three of her attempts in the long jump and thus had no chance of qualifying for the U.S. team that competed in the World Championships at the same Hayward Field venue the following month.
“I’m not really sure,” Davis-Woodhall said when asked if her three scratches in the national title meet were devastating to her. “It’s hard for me to go back in that time, but I knew I didn’t want to have that feeling again. I just kind of let it roll. I didn’t put much thought into it.”
The sting of that disappointment became a bit easier to deal with two and a half weeks later when Davis-Woodhall won a meet in Chula Vista, California, in which she leaped a wind-aided 7.24 (23-9), the longest jump of her career under any conditions. She also had a jump of 7.03 (23-0¾) that was not wind-aided.
“When I got that huge jump in Chula Vista, that kind of helped everything,” she said. “You know, not be as salty because I knew who I was and I knew what I could do, but it just wasn’t my time yet.”
After marrying Woodhall in October of 2022, she began the 2023 indoor season with victories in the Mew Mexico Collegiate Classic and the Tyson Invitational before winning her first USATF title in the indoor championships that were held at the Albuquerque Convention Center. However, her victory was later nullified because she had tested positive for THC, a chemical found in cannabis, marijuana, and hashish, which are considered prohibited substances under World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) rules.
The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) determined the “use of cannabis occurred out-of-competition” and was “unrelated to sport performance” in imposing a reduced one-month suspension. Davis-Woodhall declined to discuss it when asked about the penalty, but she went on to have the best outdoor season of her career after serving it.
In her first three meets following the end of the suspension, Davis-Woodhall won the LSU Invitational with a wind-aided jump of 7.05 (23-1¾), the Arkansas Twilight meet with a season best of 7.07 (23-2½), and the USATF Bermuda Grand Prix in Devonshire with a wind-aided mark of 7.11 (23-4) in which the wind reading of 2.1 meters-per-second was just over the allowable of 2.0 for record purposes.
She then competed in seven more meets — garnering four wins, two second-place finishes and a third — prior to the World Championships, where she had the top jump during the qualifying round at 6.87 (22-6½) and finished second in the final at 6.91 (22-8).
She achieved that mark on her first jump, but Vuleta surpassed it in the second round when she leaped 7.05 (23-1¾).
The 33-year-old Serb then took a huge step toward winning her first World Championship outdoor title when she all but slammed the door shut on the competition with a leap of 7.14 (23-5¼), her longest outdoor jump ever, in the fifth round.
“I am just so in awe,” Davis-Woodhall told Lewis Johnson of NBC Sports in a trackside interview after her silver-medal winning performance. “I have no idea. I might be out of words for the first time… I am so thankful and I’m so thankful for my coach, my husband, my support team for getting me to this point and allowing me to be myself. And without that, I wouldn’t be here.”
She went on to say that she was “so happy for Ivana” and how much she admired her ability to set an outdoor personal best in a World Championship final.
But later at some point, after she and Woodhall had returned to their home in Fayetteville that they share with their two dogs and cat, she concluded that finishing second was no longer going to cut it. Unless it came in a competition in which she produced a big mark, like a jump of 7.15 (23-5½).
“I don’t want to win off of a jump where I know people can come and get me,” she said. “I know that jumping and winning off a something like 681, I’m not going to be satisfied. Yeah, I’m going to be happy that I won. But I’m not going to be satisfied because I know I can jump farther, right? I’d rather jump 715 and get second place. I want to go farther just for my love for the sport. I love the long jump because I know we can go farther.”
When asked what is her greatest strength as a long jumper, Davis-Woodhall paused for a few moments before stating that her “technicality” is her biggest asset.
“I’m a very technical jumper. I do have power, but I get my big jumps off of my technical work. I can sprint fast down the runway and I can generate a lot of power off the board. But I’m not going to go anywhere if I don’t have the technique down.”
She had no hesitation when asked what she enjoys most about the event.
“Dude, I am throwing my body across the sand for fun, like just seeing how far I can jump,” she said. “There’s no one in the world that just does that, so why not make it fun? Why make it so serious? That’s what I’ve been saying since last year: OK fans, let’s see how far a human body can go — and let’s make it pretty.”