A few months after his decathlon record, all-around athlete Leo Neugebauer also broke the 22-year-old German indoor record in the heptathlon.
The 23-year-old won the college event “NCAA Indoor Championships” in Boston with 6,347 points, surpassing Frank Busemann’s record from 2002 in Tallinn (6,291 points) and impressively underlining his medal ambitions a few months before the Summer Olympics in Paris .
Neugebauer is now in 21st place in the all-time indoor best list. The annual best performance in the heptathlon is held by the Swiss Simon Ehammer, who achieved 6,418 points in Glasgow a week ago.
At the beginning of February, Neugebauer narrowly missed the record at the New Mexico Collegiate Classic in Albuquerque with 6,219 points because he was particularly weak in the last two disciplines. Not this time.
The fifth-place finisher at the World Championships in Budapest got off to a brilliant start on Friday and, with 6.98 seconds over the 60 meters, was only two hundredths above his personal best from a few weeks ago. Neugebauer was also in good shape in the long jump (7.73 m) and shot put (16.72 m) – and at the end of the day jumped 2.09 m, higher than ever before.
Season’s best performance in the 60 m hurdles
Over the 60 m hurdles at the start of day two, the Görlitz native set a season’s best performance of 8.25 seconds; in the pole vault he was only just below his best from last summer with 5.16 m. He needed 2:46.42 minutes over the final 1000 m.
Just last June, Neugebauer, who studied at the University of Texas and competes in Germany for VfB Stuttgart, improved Jürgen Hingsen’s 39-year-old German decathlon record to 8,836 points and became the beacon of hope for struggling German athletics.
Neugebauer said at the beginning of the year that “a medal is due” in 2024 at Leichtathletik.de: “That’s what I’m trying to work towards.” He also considers the magic mark of 9,000 points to be “feasible,” but he “just has to get a little more out of it in every discipline.” So far only four decathletes have broken this mark; the world record set by Frenchman Kevin Mayer in 2018 is 9,126 points.