A Puzzler of Olympic Proportions

Mar 07, 2005

RAY: This is the debut puzzler from my 'Track and Field series." A fellow named David Johnson sent it in. I, of course, had to fool around with it a little bit.

TOM: In other words, he won't even recognize it.

RAY: If I hadn't used his name, he wouldn't have known it was his! Here it is:

An athlete competing in the Olympic Games puts forth a record-setting performance in the long jump.

Not only does he record the longest jump, but he sets a world record as well. His jump is accepted into the record books, and no one has jumped farther than this fellow.

But, he does not win a gold medal. In fact, he does not win a bronze medal, or a silver medal. He wins squat.

TOM: But it's Olympic squat!

RAY: That's another event: the squat! There's the squat, the jerk - you should compete in that one! I didn't know they had an Olympic event just for you! What's the jerk doing? He's doing squat!

Anyway - the question is, why doesn't he win a gold, silver, bronze, or any kind of medal, despite having a record setting jump?

RAY: The answer is he was in an event called the decathlon. Even though his record went into the books, he did so poorly in the other events that he didn't win.

The long jump was a hint, because that's one of the events in the decathlon.

Do we have a winner?

TOM: Yeah, we do. The winner is John Spaulding from Prospect, Kentucky. And for having his answer selected at random from among all those correct answers that we got, John gets a 26-dollar gift certificate to the Shameless Commerce Division at cartalk.com with which he can pick up a brand-new Car Talk baseball jersey. It's black and gray with three-quarter-length sleeves, and Car Talk Plaza written in baseball-type script. It's actually a very, very nice shirt.

RAY: Really? How did that happen?

TOM: They cut us completely out of the approval loop.

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