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Mac Wilkins’ world record-shattering season 50 years later

April 17, 2026

Mac Wilkins stepped into the discus ring that afternoon in a state of bewilderment.

A few minutes earlier, Craig Caudill, a hurdler and teammate of Wilkins on the Pacific Coast Club, had been shagging Wilkins’ warm-up throws before the Mt. SAC Relays on April 24, 1976.

“Man, those are really great, you’re throwing about 69 meters (226-feet, 4 inches),” Caudill told Wilkins.

“No,” Wilkins said. “You’re mistaken, you’ve got the lines off a little bit, it’s 64 meters.”

Only a few hours earlier, Wilkins’ back had locked up so severely that it took him 15 minutes to get out bed. Sixty-nine meters? John Powell’s year-old world record was 69.08 meters.

Sixty-nine meters?

No way.

“No, no,” Caudill insisted. “I’m sure it’s 69.”

“That can’t be right,” Wilkins remembered thinking as he entered the ring at Hilmer Lodge Stadium for the start of the competition. “I don’t know what’s going on here. I guess I was ready to throw in spite of my back.”

Caudill was right.

And Wilkins was more than ready.

Wilkins unleashed a world record-setting throw of 226-11 (69.18 meters) that afternoon, the opening shot in what remains one of the most dominant seasons in track and field history. The following week at the San Jose Invitational, Wilkins broke his own world record on three consecutive throws, shattering the 70-meter and 230-feet barriers along the way. By the end of the 1976 season, Wilkins, a former NCAA champion at Oregon, was an Olympic gold medalist and owner of the top six and seven of the top eight ratified throws in history.

It wasn’t just the numbers that Wilkins put up, it was how he reached them that transformed the event. Wilkins elevated throwing a 4-pound, 6-ounce disc to an art form.

Dr. Leroy Perry Jr., a world-renowned chiropractor who worked with top athletes from Wilkins to nine-time Olympic champion Carl Lewis to NFL and NBA stars, recalled the reaction of even East German and other Soviet bloc athletes to Wilkins’ Olympic victory in Montreal.

“They were all in awe of Mac,” Perry said. “When he won the gold medal in ’76, they were all blown away, completely blown away. He was so beautiful, his movement. It was like a ballet dancer. Like watching a ballet dancer throw the discus.”

Saturday at the 66th Annual Mt. SAC Relays, Wilkins’ will be recognized for that first world record 50 years ago and an afternoon that would signal his emergence out of the shadows of his late Oregon teammate, distance running icon Steve Prefontaine, and his bitter rival Powell, to becoming one of the most exciting and controversial superstars in the world’s second most popular sport and a leading voice for athlete rights as the sport’s powers that be fought to keep track and field, like other Olympic sports, amateur, prohibiting athletes from benefitting financially from their accomplishments and labor.

Wilkins, now 75, was asked in an interview this week if it seems like it’s been a half-century since that groundbreaking afternoon in Walnut?

“Yes and no,” he said, laughing. “Yeah, it does, it seems about that. Another era.”

Wilkins entered Oregon in the fall of 1969. Among his freshman classmates was Prefontaine, who had already raced through Europe the previous summer as a member of the U.S. national team. By the following spring, Prefontaine was on the cover of Sports Illustrated and on his way to becoming a cult hero, American track and field’s first (and last) rock star.

“I called him ‘World,’ which was short for world-famous,” Wilkins said. “He’d smile and it would roll right off him.”

Wilkins’ nickname was “Multiple Mac,” given to him because of his success across all four throws–shot put, discus, javelin and hammer throw. Many in the sport viewed the javelin as his best event, but he was forced to drop it his junior year at Oregon after blowing out his elbow.

He won the NCAA and Amateur Athletic Union, then the sport’s national governing body, discus titles in 1973 as a Duck senior and only to be faced with the grim reality facing aspiring post-collegiate American Olympians.

Like Prefontaine, Wilkins would be greatly influenced in his views of those controlling U.S. Olympic sports from legendary Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman, a World War II hero, co-founder of Nike and a constant thorn in the side of the USOC and AAU.

“He taught us to think what’s the best thing to do for the athlete and question authority,” Wilkins said. “He was this crusty old military guy and (question authority) was a student radical saying, but that’s what I got from Bill Bowerman.”

Under the rules of the International Olympic Committee and IAAF (now World Athletics), track and field’s global governing body, athletes were prohibited from receiving money for their sport. Prize money, appearance fees, sponsorship money were all prohibited. Athletes in Eastern Bloc nations received government funding but not in the U.S.

“The thing has a long history of even before my time,” Wilkins said. “A very patriarchal, condescending, old rich, white guys’ society, that’s what the International Olympic Committee was. If you had a job, you were not an amateur and only amateurs could compete, so you had to be rich enough not to work in the very beginning. And so it went on from there. ‘We know what’s best for you. You should do what we tell you to do. Here’s your airplane ticket. Here’s your uniform and here’s your room in the Olympic Village. So take these things and be grateful because if it wasn’t for us, you wouldn’t be here.’”

For a while, Wilkins taught European history and economics at South Eugene High School, less than a mile from the Oregon campus. In between teaching and training, Wilkins helped coach South’s throwers. The school’s head coach was Harry Johnson, who guided South distance runners to national high school records in five different events.

Johnson recalled his young throws coach’s attention to detail.

“He was a technician,” Johnson said. “It didn’t make any difference whether it was javelin, discus, or shot, or hammer. He just addressed the events in such a technical manner. That’s what I was always impressed with.”

Johnson was already well aware of Wilkins’ intensity.

Wilkins recalled in a documentary on Prefontaine how he resented holidays because he couldn’t train.

“Kind of silly and kind of serious,” he said. “I wanted to express how serious I was. ‘How dare they close the YMCA on those days that I can’t go in and train.’”

“We had a better weight room at South Eugene than he had at the University of Oregon,” Johnson said. “So he did a lot of his weight training at our school. When you watch him go through those workouts, you could see the intensity, where he understood how the final product was and how he was going to get there.”

One of the ways Wilkins hoped to get there was getting out of the wet Oregon weather and focusing solely on training in the year leading up to the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal.

While athletes were prohibited from receiving athletic-related money, some nevertheless accepted so-called “under the table” appearance fees or bonuses for wins or records from meet promoters or shoe companies.

“That’s a good question,” Johnson said when asked how post-grad athletes survived in the “amateur era.” “They’d go to Europe. The better ones could make enough money to get them through the rest of the year or so. That was another world then.”

Wilkins hoped to make enough money under the table during the summer of 1975 to allow him to give up teaching and move to California to train full-time. But going into his final throw at a meet in Stockholm at what looked like the end of a disappointing European campaign, Wilkins had $200 in the bank, a return plane ticket to Portland and no other meet invitations.

“I had not performed well,” he admitted.

But Wilkins delivered a big throw on his last attempt and the meet invites started to come back his way.

“The next six to eight weeks I did make some money,” he said, “and it led to the big breakthrough in ’76.”

In November 1975, he paid $600 for a Volkswagen bug and moved into an apartment across the street from San Jose City College. Money remained an issue.

“I was happy to throw the shot indoors and get a few hundred dollars in indoor competition,” Wilkins said. “In March 1976, I was able to apply and get food stamps. I guess I had some savings from the previous summer saved up. But I don’t remember doing anything to make money that was not from track and field. Five hundred dollars was a big payday. You do that a couple times a month and you were as happy as a clam.”

When Wilkins arrived in Walnut that afternoon in April 1976, the meet’s history and the stadium’s wind conditions had already well established the meet as a circle-the-day event on discus throwers’ calendars. Rink Babka set a world record in the discus at the Mt. SAC Relays in 1960. Four-time Olympic champion Al Oerter broke the world record at Mt. SAC in 1963 and 1964.

“I was very aware of Mt. SAC as a place where discus throwers had good results,” Wilkins said. “Very aware of it. For sure, it was in my mind, ‘OK, we go here and everybody throws well, so maybe I better throw well too.’ Expectations, sometimes, it’s just that psychological lift, ‘OK, we’re going to do well today.’”

But Wilkins wasn’t thinking of world records that day. He had suffered an injury throwing the shot during the indoor season.

“I couldn’t lift weights,” Wilkins said. “I couldn’t throw for about six weeks. And I didn’t start up until about the middle of March. So I had five or six weeks of training, basically starting from scratch. I had no idea how that was going to impact my early season results, Mt. SAC being early season.”

Then the night before Mt. SAC, Wilkins was crashing at Perry’s house when his back locked up.

“I tried to get out of bed and I could barely move, and it was one of those bad situations, something’s out of place in my back,” Wilkins said. “It took about 15 minutes just to get out of bed, to move to the side, to sit up straight, to get my legs over the edge and try and stand up, I had my hands on my quad and I was trying to support my upper body and I could barely move, and I thought I guess we’ll have our competition in maybe another couple of weeks. This isn’t going to work.”

Perry recalled that Wilkins “was so screwed up he couldn’t stand up straight. Mac had a severe spasm. He could hardly breathe, let alone walk.”

Perry placed Wilkins on a spinal decompressor machine, a groundbreaking forward inversion unit that Perry had designed as the first of U.S. military doctors to treat soldiers and first responders with back issues.

“Fortunately I was at Dr. Perry’s house and he did a couple of adjustments and I was able to move around, but I was still really tight and stiff and cautious of the pain, the tenderness of it,” Wilkins said.

“This machine really saved his bacon,” Perry said.

Later at the stadium, Wilkins recalled, Perry “said go warm up and come back in about a half an hour and I’ll give you another treatment and I did that and came back and he gave me a second round for about 20 minutes.”

A little while later, Caudill was telling Wilkins he was in record territory.

“My first throw (of the competition) I think I threw 64 and a half meters, and I realized (Caudill) was right and I was throwing about 69 meters, and I thought, ‘Holy crap, how can this be?’ So you get a little bit tight,” Wilkins said.

His second throw reached 225-7. He was just 13 inches off Powell’s world record of 226-8.

“‘Ok I can find my way now,’” Wilkins recalled thinking after the second throw. “This is real.”

Then after fouling his third throw, Wilkins blasted a world record throw of 226-11, or 69.18 meters.

While, Wilkins said, “everybody in the discus throw area knew it was a world record,” the historic throw went largely unnoticed by most of the crowd in the moment. The world record landed in the middle of a heated high school relay race that had captured the attention of the stadium announcer and most of the fans. When Wilkins’ mark of 69.18 was announced, few in the largely metric illiterate crowd recognized its significance. It was another 15 to 20 minutes before fans were informed that they had witnessed — or missed — a world record.

Making the record even more impressive was the revelation in the post-competition weighing of Wilkins’ discus to verify the record that the implement was actually two ounces heavier than the required 4 pounds, 6 ounces weight, a fact that cost Wilkins additional inches, probably feet.

“My sense in ’74 and ’75 there had been progress, but it hadn’t come out,” Wilkins said. “It had been building up and building up and finally it came out.

“Finally the results came out in ’76. I think about being afraid of after the world record, what comes after the world record and realizing, ‘Oh yeah, I can do better, don’t be afraid.’ That was an interesting moment and time, actually.”

“Probably two things came to mind, before I threw in the competition about what I was warming up at, so I overcame my initial nervousness on the first throw. Secondly, it really wasn’t that great of a throw. I know I can do better.

“That was kind of the driving factor. That is one of the driving factors, that anybody playing golf or throwing the discus, ‘Yeah, that was pretty good, but boy, there were a few things I think I can do better.’ So you’re always trying to fix it and make it better. You know the impossible pursuit. Maybe once in life you’ll get the perfect throw, but there are degrees of perfect throws, I think. But yeah, that was it like ‘Ok, great I got a new PR (personal record) and I know I can do better, oh, it’s a world record that’s great, that’s fine too, but I’m still focused on my path and where I’m going.’”

Wilkins wasn’t focused on competing against others or chasing records. He was competing against himself.

“Absolutely,” he said. “That had always been a driving factor.

“Competing with others was the frosting on the cake. But you have to win the battle with yourself first of all.”

And the sweetest icing was beating Powell. They couldn’t have been more different. Wilkins was from the People’s Republic of Eugene, had long hair and a beard, was outspoken, constantly questioning authority. Powell was a former San Jose police officer.

Powell entered the Olympic year as the gold medal favorite. Wilkins made no secret of his own golden ambitions. All of which fueled track’s nastiest rivalry.

Neither made any attempt to hide their contempt for the other from the media or the public.

Track writers and fans referred to the pair as “the Bickersons.”

Powell was unaware in the fall of 1975 that Wilkins had been invited to join the Pacific Coast Club by team director Tom Jennings, Wilkins said.

“Kind a slap in the face or not a happy thing for John,” Wilkins said.

Powell had not competed at Mt. SAC but was waiting for Wilkins the following weekend at the San Jose meet, May 1.

“Lookin’ pretty big there Wilkins,” Wilkins recalled Powell greeting him. “And I said ‘Yeah, I guess throwing big too.’ Some smart ass remark like that.

“The fuse had not been lit yet on that day. But once the competition started, that was a whole different story. I guess I was releasing several years of pent-up anger, frustration at what I thought of him being a jerk. A lot of back and forth, trash talking and I never trash-talked except on that day.”

Wilkins and Powell were greeted at the San Jose State facility with a discus-friendly 10 to 15 mph wind.

“I was very serious about breaking the record again,” Wilkins told Track & Field News at the time. “And when I saw that wind, I was even more psyched. But I really wanted to beat Powell.”

Wilkins broke his world record on his first throw with a 229-0 heave.

“Put it away, John,” Wilkins said to Powell as he stepped out of the ring before the throw had even been measured. “It’s all over.”

“Felt like I was wet cement up to my mid thigh, and I couldn’t go any faster than that, which usually means if it feels like you’re going in slow motion, you’re probably doing everything just right,” Wilkins said this week.

Wilkins broke the 70-meters and 230-feet barriers on his second throw with a 230-5, 70.24 mark.

“Another PR,” he said. “It was an amazing throw.”

He raised the record to 232-5 with his third throw. In a week, Wilkins had improved the world record by nearly 6 feet.

“Get a PR, usually you’re done for the day. But to get three in a row, to me that was the biggest, most amazing thing, three consecutive life records, that’s what I remember the most,” Wilkins said. “To me, that’s the most significant thing about that day, that I got three consecutive life records based on planning, evaluating and executing a throw. All that other stuff, ‘Oh, they were world records, great. Oh, John was there and I slapped him down verbally, OK, great. What else? Oh, I just confirmed the fears you have after a life record, will I ever be able to throw this far again?’ And I had that question all week after the competition at Mt SAC and I made those fears go away.

“I don’t think that sunk in. At the end of the competition on May 1st, ‘Yeah that was a really good throw, but I know I can do this, and there was this, and this and I didn’t really utilize the wind, I didn’t slide that well. So you keep going. Of course.”

Wilkins broke the Olympic record in the Montreal qualifying rounds and then captured the gold medal by more than four feet with a 221-5 throw. But his Olympic victory was overshadowed by his dispute with U.S. Olympic Committee officials and his embrace of East Germany’s Wolfgang Schmidt, a friend, who had edged Powell for the silver medal on his final throw.

“I went over and picked Schmidt up and gave him a big hug, and guess what?” Wilkins said at the time. “Everybody around there thought I had insulted Powell, my fellow countryman. John Powell was not my friend, but Wolfgang was. I wasn’t looking at what country Schmidt was from. I was just looking at the terrific performance he had made, coming through on his last throw like that to take a silver medal.”

To Maren Seidler, the U.S. women’s shot put champion, the criticism of Wilkins’ embrace of Schmidt was hypocritical.

“It was one of those rare times when the Olympics did what they were advertised to do,” she told reporters later. “A guy’s respect for another guy’s come-through effort transcended nationality and ideology. And what happened? People were offended by it. Offended?”

Even with his Olympic champion status increasing the amount of under-the-table payments from European meet promoters and adidas, Wilkins made less than $50,000 in 1976.

“Nineteen-eighty four was probably my biggest year and I probably made $60,000,” he said. “It was pretty meager even if you convert that to dollars today. It’s not very much.”

Speaking with reporters after the competition in Montreal, all the frustration Wilkins, Prefontaine, Bowerman and hundreds of other athletes had felt toward the American system came rushing out.

“I would like to see East Germany win all the medals — maybe that would shake up our people a bit,” he said somewhat sarcastically. “The East Germans don’t want a bunch of out-of-shape slobs walking around, so they get everybody interested in athletics of some kind. Americans prefer to sit in front of their TV and watch the pros play. Watching pro football doesn’t develop healthy bodies.

“What we (US governing bodies) were doing was a travesty. East Germany and many other countries, including some in the West, support their athletes. Our athletes aren’t getting any support at all from the Olympic people. … All I got from the Olympic officials was an airline ticket and a uniform. They didn’t support me. They didn’t help me. I got to the Olympics on my own.”

Wilkins later said, “My intention was to shake up people back home, to realize things here in Montreal didn’t run smoothly and that the athletes were caught up in a bureaucracy at a time their minds should have been free to concentrate on athletics, not USOC bungling.”

The USOC took notice.

USOC president Philip Krumm called Wilkins a “grandstander and a pop-off” and said his comments were “like hating your parents.”

“Without Olympic funds and help, he (Wilkins) would not be here and have that medal,” Krumm said.

“Well it’s true. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t be there,” Wilkins said this week. “But if they weren’t in the way, we would be better off competitively compared to where we were. It was definitely a solo, entrepreneur thing and we’re competing against the state-sponsored machines of the Soviet bloc.”

Jimmy Carter’s Olympic boycott and the USOC and national governing bodies for Olympic sports caving in to pressure from the Carter administration denied Wilkins and U.S. athletes the chance to compete against those machines at the 1980 Games in Moscow and only reinforced the notion that American athletes really were on their own.

The right-handed Wilkins threw a lifetime best 232-10 into left-handed thrower-friendly wind at July 9 meet in Helsinki. Despite the unfavorable wind, the mark was more than 14 feet farther than the gold medal-winning throw at the Olympic Games two weeks later.

“Why are you doing this?” Wilkins recalled thinking of the boycott at the time. “It seemed like a very naive way of doing things.

“The boycott was, ‘OK, screw you.’ I do know after ’76 it justified, validated everything I said about the U.S. Olympic Committee.”

Wilkins earned a silver medal at the 1984 Olympics, Powell claiming another bronze medal. Wilkins then continued his trash-talking rivalry with Powell into a fourth Olympic cycle.

“The deal is there’s an adrenal reflex where athletes get kind of on the edge and that whole controversy with Powell was just their way of jacking themselves up for adrenaline, I always felt,” said Perry, who also worked with Powell. “I never really thought there was a problem between them. It was always funny to watch them get jacked up.”

“There actually were some times in the early 80s and going at it, but kind of knew we were joking about it, we were pretending. It was like pro wrestling,” Wilkins said. “We were pretending and kind of winking at each other and making these crazy statements to the press.

“I liked him. I wanted to like him. He just kept acting like a jerk, but yeah, ok.”

Wilkins reached out to Powell again shortly before his death at 75 in August 2022.

“It was toward the end of his life,” Wilkins said. “I called him up. Told him that we loved him.

“He didn’t respond, but his wife later told me that he heard us.”

Wilkins would compete in a third and final Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988, finishing fifth just weeks shy of his 38th birthday. Later he would establish himself as one of the nation’s top throws coaches.

When Wilkins was asked this week why he stayed in the sport so long, he recalled having a similar conversation with the great Norwegian distance runner Grete Waitz decades earlier. She continued, Waitz said, because every race, every training run was an opportunity for self-discovery.

“It was fun,” Wilkins said of his career. “It was an incredible challenge. There were so many things you can work on to improve. It’s an endless puzzle you’re trying to put together and it was really fun to work on. It was really fun to do, really fun to do. And the second thing was, ‘Yeah, I can fix these mistakes and I can do better.’

“‘I can do better tomorrow.’”

Orange County Register

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Mac Wilkins’ world record-shattering season 50 years later

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