How Floreal unlocked Davis’s potential to become marquee athlete

Edrick Floreal – long-time Canadian record-holder for long jump and triple jump, and horizontal jumps and high hurdles coach extraordinaire – took a little stutter on the approach to the suggested answer to the question.

Surely the pivotal event in the resurrection of 2015 world U18 champion Tara Davis’ hitherto faltering long jump career was the NCAA Indoor Championships at the Randall Tyson Indoor Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas on 12 March this year?

After all, the 6.93m that the former teenage Californian prodigy uncorked in the third round that day was the giant leap that took her past the 6.91m US indoor collegiate record jointly held by Elva Gouldbourne and Whitney Gibson to top spot in the 2021 world indoor list for the women’s long jump – ahead of Ukraine’s European indoor champion Maryna Bekh Romanchuk (6.92m) and Italy’s world U20 indoor record breaker Larissa Iapichino (6.91m).

And that, in turn, proved the springboard to Davis bursting through the seven-metre barrier at the Texas Relays two weeks later to lay down an early world-leading marker of 7.14m in the outdoor season that includes the delayed Tokyo Olympics.

“Actually,” said Coach Flo, as Floreal is known to his mightily impressive cohort of charges as head coach at the University of Texas in Austin, “I would say that the meeting before that was more revealing, or the starting point or whatever, for what’s to come next. It was the Conference meet.”

Competing at the Big 12 Indoor Championships in Lubbock, Texas, on 26 February, Davis equalled her four-year-old indoor PB of 6.68m but lost out to Texas Tech’s Ruth Usoro, who jumped 6.82m to clinch a long jump-triple jump double – and secure Olympic qualification for Nigeria in both events.

“She’d been struggling with depression and trying to get herself together,” continued Coach Flo, alluding to Davis’ three-year struggle to get into the groove as a senior athlete, having been obliged to serve a collegiate competition suspension following her transfer from the University of Georgia to the University of Texas and then been hit by a foot injury and the 2020 collegiate outdoor wipe-out caused by the Covid pandemic.

“The meet before the Conference [the delightfully-named Wooo Pig Classic in Fayetteville on 22 January], she had jumped 6.50m for the first time in two years [winning with 6.56m]. That was a happy day for her because she hadn’t seen that number, which for us is 21 feet, for a long time. ‘I’m just so glad to be back there’, she said.

“At the Conference meeting she was in second and very happy to be there. Then there was a 30-minute break while they figured out the running order and when they got started again everybody was stiff and tired and had mentally just about given up.

“But Tara was the first jumper back and jumped 6.68m and took the lead. She started going crazy. She was ready to celebrate that she had won something big for the first time in three years of being demolished and then, with the last jump, the jumper from Texas Tech (Usoro), just beat her.

“She imploded. She was devastated. She couldn’t stop crying. I had to force her to get something to eat. She just wanted to go to her room and be done.

“But that night I gave her a call and told her, ‘There’s two weeks to the nationals. Promise to give me everything you have…’ She was not the very best, at that point, to committing to the training.

“Changes had been made to her technique and she was not very comfortable with it. She was coming off the long jump board so fast that she was a little scared.

“And so I told her, ‘If you give me two weeks of complete commitment to the process, I promise you that none of these people will ever beat you again.’

“She mulled it over and said, ‘I don’t think I have any choice anyway.’ I said, ‘Well, with commitment, you do have a choice to commit your soul to doing it.’ And she said, ‘Ah, well, I’ll commit.’

“It was amazing. Starting from that Monday, it was a completely different person. She just stuck to the technical adjustment. It was, like, ‘If I’m going to die trying, I’m just going to keep doing it.’

“And it got more and more comfortable. She bought into it and thought, ‘Wow, if I can do that in the meet, I can win.’

“Then we went, two weeks later, to the 6.93m. The rest is history… She came back a couple of weeks later and broke Jackie Joyner-Kersee’s record.”

 

 

 

 

 

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The great all-rounder’s US collegiate outdoor record had stood at 6.93m for 36 years before the 7.14m jump that continued Davis’ leap of faith in technical adjustment urged by her coach, a two-time Olympian with a coaching CV that includes piloting Keni Harrison to her 12.20 stunner of a 100m hurdles record.

“I guess she’s what they call a ‘stutter-stepper’,” Floreal said of Davis, who happens to also be a world class hurdler in her own right, clocking a 12.75 PB behind Harrison’s 12.48 at the Texas Invitational in Austin on 1 May. “She would run at the board and be way too close to the board and not have enough room in the last couple of steps.

“She would just run in as fast as she could and stutter-step in and jump off the board. She would almost use her take-off leg like a pole vault. She would stick out her leg and it would basically flex and sort of throw her like a pole vaulter.

“Now this is a luck thing. Sometimes you will jump far; sometimes you won’t. So what we adjusted to is having a little bit longer next-to-last step and launching herself willingly forward into the pit, as opposed to slamming the foot and hoping that gravity and tension and forces throw her forward.

“The difference is before she was getting to the edge of the cliff and being pushed into the void. Now she is willingly jumping into the void.”

Floreal knows what he is talking about when it comes to committing to jumps. His Canadian long jump record, 8.20m, has stood since July 1991 and his national triple jump mark, 17.29m, since 1989. Married to LaVonna Martin-Floreal, who took Olympic 100m hurdles silver for the US in 1992 (their son, EJ, happens to be 0.05 short of the Tokyo 200m qualifying time for Canada with a PB of 20.29), he placed 18th in the qualifying round of the triple jump at the 1988 Olympics and 28th in long jump qualifying in Barcelona four years later.

At the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland, Floreal claimed the triple jump bronze medal behind the victorious Marios Hadjiandreou of Cyprus and the future world record-definer Jonathan Edwards of England.

The manner in which he has drawn Davis, who turns 22 today (20 May), out of a slough of despair brings back the memory of a crestfallen Edwards slumped in the bowels of Montjuic Stadium in Barcelona. The Briton had just finished 35th in the 1992 Olympic qualifying round with a paltry 15.76m. Thoughts of 18.29m were far from his mind. He was seriously contemplating a change of career.

“Nobody accomplishes anything without having that kind of moment,” said Floreal. “The catastrophe that makes you have to make a decision and make changes to what you’re doing.

“The old you is no longer sufficient. It has to be a new you with new habits, new determination, new commitment and new sacrifices.

“You need those kind of elements that spur your emotions. It’s like Keni Harrison and her world record. When she didn’t make the Olympic team in 2016, she wanted to go home and take a break. She didn’t want to compete any more.

“It was basically me just being a tyrant, dragging her and forcing her to keep on competing. By the time Keni got to London, she was so angry about not making the team, she didn’t just want revenge on everybody that beat her at the trials; she wanted revenge by a lot to prove that she was superior. That’s how she ended up getting the world record.

“With Tara, she was so negative before. Everything was preparing for the very worst.

“There was a point where I attempted to get her more committed, more serious, more into the details of the process. There’s forces, stride pattern, stride length. I tried to get her to understand the information.

“Like Keni…  I call her the hurdle nerd. She wants to know every little thing. ‘What was my velocity? What was my this? What was my that?’

“Tara is the opposite. I tried to get her to be more serious. It didn’t work. So eventually I just gave up. I remember telling her, going into the NCAAs, ‘You’re an absolute idiot. You run around there like a wild dog. Just be you and I’ll worry about getting you on the board and being successful.’

“It’s like having a puppy and you worry about having the back gate open. That’s how coaching Tara is. Every day I have to check the back gate to make sure it’s locked.

“That’s the way I coach her. I just allow her to be who she is. The silliness, the stuff she’s doing….You’ve just no idea what’s going to come next. But she trains at a high level now.

“You would think that she’s completely unfocused but I understand now that it has nothing to do with focus. This is just who she is.

“If I turn my back, she’s taking selfies with somebody in the stand. But five minutes later she’s back on the runway jumping 23 feet [7.01m].

“I just accept the silliness and the wildness and the loss of attention for five or six minutes as just part of who she is. And in return I get five or six minutes of complete commitment.”

That commitment extends to not just training in a jumps group that also includes Sha’Keela Saunders, ninth in the long jump at the World Athletics Championships Doha 2019, but in a high hurdles group featuring Harrison and Pan American silver medallist Chanel Brissett, a 12.50 performer.

“Some of those hurdles sessions are like being in an Olympic final some days,” said Floreal, who guided Omar McLeod (110m hurdles) and Kori Carter (400m hurdles) to world titles over the barriers in 2017 and whose former charge Sydney McLaughlin took world 400m hurdles silver in 2019.

“Keni hates to lose. Tara’s tried hard to beat her and they’ve gone to war a couple of times. Keni just won’t let her have it.

“I think the hurdles is part of the process that Tara’s trying to accomplish. Her goal is to be a marquee athlete. If you look at the best in our sport – Allyson Felix, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Bolt – they’ve done multiple stuff.

“I think she can run in the 12.40s. She’s still not completely letting herself run free. There’s a part of the race at the end, when things start moving really fast, that her eyes get big and she slams on the brakes a little bit.

“Like the long jump, I’m hoping we can eventually get past that and become more instinctive.”

In the meantime, the wild child turned world leader can only go with the Coach Flo long jump formula and look to make a giant leap come Tokyo time.

Simon Turnbull for World Athletics