by Glen McMicken
The United States has been a consistent presence on the men's shot put podium at global championships, placing at least one athlete among the medalists in 27 of the 30 Olympic Games (including the U.S.-boycotted Moscow Games in 1980) and 18 of the 20 World Athletics Championships. Americans have swept the medals at the Olympics seven times, and in 2022 Team USATF performed that feat for the first time at the World Athletics Championships. No other nation has ever placed three athletes on the men's shot podium at a single global championship.
As these charts show, Team USATF has the biggest share of total medals at the Olympics and World Championships, collecting 60% of Olympic Games hardware and 44% of the available World Championships medals. Americans have garnered 20 Olympic golds and 12 World Championships golds. These medals were no fluke as the U.S. has also produced better top-end performances on average throughout the last century. In an examination of the average of the top five throws by Americans and non-Americans since 1920, one can see that with only a couple exceptions U.S. athletes have been superior. This is a testament to the depth and quality of U.S. performers who have been helped along by the best development pipeline in the world.
Since the initial IAAF (now World Athletics) ratified world record of 15.54m by Ralph Rose in 1909, American men have set 38 more world records in the shot put. Rose was the early star of the show with a pair of Olympic golds and a silver between 1900-1912, and there were three medal sweeps as the U.S. captured 11 of 12 possible Olympic medals. His world record stood until 1928. A group of 10 U.S. throwers held the world record for 42 years from 1934-1976 in what could be called the first Golden Era of American shot putting, highlighted by legends including Parry O'Brien, Dallas Long, and Randy Matson. Jack Torrance set three world records in 1934, the last of which was a massive 17.40m that would stand until 1948. A hot streak carried Jim Fuchs to four straight world records from 1949-1950 before O'Brien became the first man to hit 18 meters in 1953. Over the next three years he would better his world record eight times, and after Long tied his best of 19.25m in 1959, O'Brien upped the record to 19.30m. Heading into the 1960s the battle for the world record was between Long and Bill Nieder, with 10 marks ratified between them. Nieder became the first man to throw 20 meters with a 20.06m performance in Walnut, CA. Long set the last of his seven world records with a toss of 20.68m in 1964, and a year later the event was broken open with a stunning 21.52m blast by Texas A&M's Randy Matson at the 1965 Southwest Conference Championships. Matson increased that record to 21.78m in 1967, with Al Feuerbach and Terry Albritton also claiming world records in 1973 and 1976. The U.S. then hit a dry spell in the world record department before Randy Barnes' 23.12m in 1990.
A decade of unprecedented dominance has elevated Americans Ryan Crouser and Joe Kovacs to the pantheon of men's shot put greats, reinforcing the exceptional tradition the United States has in the event on the global stage. Before Paris 2024, a single nation had never swept the top two spots on the medal podium at the Olympic Games three times in a row with the same two men. But Crouser took the title in France and has won the last three Olympic golds, while Kovacs owns the last three silvers. That doesn't paint the whole picture of their rule over the event since Rio 2016, though. Only four men in history have thrown the shot 23 meters or farther, and three of them are Americans, with former world record holder Randy Barnes joining Crouser and Kovacs in that elite club. Crouser has 15 of the 21 marks beyond 23 meters, including the current world record of 23.56m that he set in Westwood, CA in 2023. Kovacs, the second farthest thrower ever at 23.23m, has three marks on that list and Barnes has two. East Germany's Ulf Timmerman is the only other man ever to surpass this barrier with a 23.06m throw, which was the world record in 1988. Going deeper, Crouser has an astounding 287 throws of 22 meters or better since 2016. That distance on one throw alone would rank someone among the top 50 all-time performers. The sheer volume of Crouser's excellence has stamped him as history's best, and he also has three straight World Athletics Championships golds to go along with a World Indoor Championships win in 2024. Kovacs won world outdoor titles in 2015 and 2019 and earned silver in 2017 and 2022 before taking bronze in 2023. That makes him the most bemedaled man ever at the World Championships, and he is also one of only four men to boast three Olympic medals. Kovacs achieved his first 22-meter throw in 2014 and now has 105 career tosses at or beyond that distance. Looking at the average of the top five performances year-by-year for Crouser and Kovacs since 2016 (see Figure 4 below), Crouser's superiority is quite clear. Add in the tenth-best mark on the world list as comparison and it demonstrates just how prolifically good the two Americans have been over the past decade.
Glen McMicken has been involved in track and field since the 1970s as a high schooler in England. He has worked with USATF since 1989, first as a volunteer with the Press Operations crew, then as a Media Relations Assistant, and currently as a Statistician and Historian. From 1980-2015, McMicken served stints as a collegiate coach at Southwest Texas State University, UT San Antonio, University of Wisconsin-Stout, Rice University, and Houston Baptist University.