World Athletics has turned back in their planned change for the long jump, a radical change in the sport that was announced back in 2024 and was met with an overwhelming negative response from current and former athletes. The idea was to remove the batting line (the line that the jumper cannot touch) for a larger area, which would reduce the number of null jumps and would make the sport more exciting.
Jon Ridgeon, former hurdler and now CEO of World Athletics, once said in the podcast 'Anything But Footy' that with the change would make "every jump counts and will add to the drama of the competition" (via Infobae).
But it was met with rejection, with four time Olympic champion Carl Lewis saying that this change would remove the most difficult skill from the event. "Just make the basket bigger for free throws because a lot of people miss them. What do you think?", he said in February 2024.
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World Athletics gives up on the controversial change for long jump
Fast forward to December 2025, and Jon Ridgeon has given up. World Athletics announced that they have scrapped the plans to change the rule, despite some tests carried out in 2024 and 2025 that had the desired effect (having less null jumps), because "you ultimately do not want to go to war with your most important group of people".
"The athletes do not want to embrace it, so we're not going to do it", said Ridgeon (via The Guardian). "Even though I would argue we identified a problem, and found a viable solution, if the athletes don't want it, fine, we drop it. But I don't regret looking at that. It's our job as the governing body."