Neugebauer Scores 8,836 Points With Seven Personal Bests And Rises To Global Contender

By David Woods for DyeStat

Kirby Lee/Image of Sport

AUSTIN, Texas – In doing what he had never done before, what no collegiate decathlete had ever done before, what no German had ever done before, Leo Neugebauer felt something he had never felt before.

With his body at its fittest, he had an out-of-body experience.

At the NCAA Division 1 Championships on Thursday, he cleared a pole vault bar set at 17 feet, 1 inch (5.21 meters). Then he shouted, knocking over a folding chair upon exiting the pit and running nearly 100 meters down the back stretch of his home Texas track at Mike A. Myers Stadium.

INTERVIEWS 

The running was there for all to see. Not as visible were the tears running down his cheeks. It was, Neugebauer said, the most emotional moment of his life.

He knew he had won. He knew he was in the middle of something memorable.

“I ran away because I couldn’t even control my body,” Neugebauer said. “I just wanted to take off. There was a tear or two involved. That just shows how much that means to me.”

Neugebauer’s decathlon score – 8,836 points, a collegiate and German record and enough to have won last year’s world title – will reverberate from Austin to Eugene to Berlin to Budapest. He set personal bests in seven of 10 events.

The 22-year old is a promising young decathlete no more. He is a contender for gold medals at August’s World Championships in Hungary and at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.

 “I don’t know what’s going to happen in Budapest,” he said, “but it’s going to be crazy.”

Also crazy: Neugebauer calculated it would take a collegiate record to win.

“If it was me or Kyle,” he said.

That would be Georgia’s Kyle Garland, who finished second with 8,630 points.

Consider no college decathlete other than the 23-year-old Garland – whose previous record of 8,720 was set last year – and Neugebauer have scored as many as 8,630. Not even Oregon’s Ashton Eaton, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, did so.

“We just have a great, great future ahead of us,” Garland said. “It’s super exciting to see how him and me are going to fare over the next 10-12 years, or however many years we’re in this sport.”

Day 2 started most auspiciously for Garland, who set a decathlon collegiate record of 13.54 seconds in the 110-meter hurdles. That yielded a 52-point lead.

From there, the German accelerated like Formula 1 driver Michael Schumacher.

Neugebauer’s 10-event rundown:

Ø  100m, 10.61 PB, 949 points.

Ø  Long jump, 25-2.5 (7.58m) PB, 980.

Ø  Shot put, 53-4.5 (16.27m), 868.

Ø  High jump, 6-8.25 (2.04m), 840.

Ø  400m, 47.08 PB, 954

Day 1 total, 4,591.

Ø  110 hurdles, 14.10 PB, 962.

Ø  Discus, 180-8 (55.06m) PB, 976.

Ø  Pole vault, 17-1 (5.21m) PB, 976.

Ø  Javelin, 188-6 (57.45m) PB, 700.

Ø  1,500m, 4:48.00, 631.

Two-day total, 8,836.

In the javelin, he said, one recent workout was “horrible.” Some self-talk followed: “You know what? It doesn’t matter what I did in the past. I can just change it like this.”

So he did, producing PBs on three successive attempts. Through nine events, his score was 8,205. The records would come down to the 1,500 meters. He conceded he was already ready to celebrate.

But he had 2 ½ hours to wait, and he said he “had to keep my cool” and listened to music. It was, he said, great to be done after the 1,500.

Iowa’s Austin West finished third with 8,054 points. Nebraska’s Till Steinforth, a 20-year-old German, was fourth with 7,991.

Neugebauer was not exactly an unknown upon arrival at Texas, having been the world’s top-ranked under-20 decathlete (7,886 points) in 2019. He was second in the NCAA decathlon in 2022 and third in the pentathlon in this year’s indoor NCAAs, where Garland nearly set a world record. Then Neugebauer scored 8,478 points at the Texas Relays on March 29-30.

Yet, it was not just winning or breaking a record that made this meaningful, but doing so in the decathlon, in which Texas, the United States and Germany have traditions. Team USA and Germany compete annually in the Thorpe Cup, a decathlon competition named after Jim Thorpe, the 1912 Olympic gold medalist and first to be called the world’s greatest athlete.

“I’m familiar with all that culture,” Neugebauer said.

On the awards podium, Neugebauer was greeted by Trey Hardee, a former Texas decathlete who won two world titles and a silver medal at the 2012 Olympics. On Twitter, Hardee posted:

The German record of 8,832 was set by Jurgen Hingsen in 1984. It was the third of three world records by Hingsen, whose duels against Britain’s Daley Thompson were one of the highlights of track and field in the 1980s.

Hingsen won silvers behind Thompson in the inaugural words at Helsinki, Finland, in 1983 and at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.

Highest German score since fall of the Berlin Wall was 8,706 by Frank Busemann, who won silver behind Dan O’Brien at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

To make a record fall in Austin isn’t as consequential as what happened in Berlin. For a college decathlon, though, this was an historic night.

“I’ll need a couple of days to realize what I achieved today,” Neugebauer said.

Contact David Woods at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidWoods007.