Ryan Crouser calling the shots in athletics for Sebastian Coe

PARIS – Two-time Olympic shot put champion Ryan Crouser’s unlikeliest achievement may be to have transfixed World Athletics president and middle-distance running legend Sebastian Coe.

Coe, a two-time Olympic 1,500m champion, admits it is “probably quite unusual” for a “track man” to go for a field event but it is the one he picked as the standout discipline ahead of the World Athletics Championships in Budapest.

Crouser, 30, puts his world title on the line on Saturday while fellow American and two-time champion Joe Kovacs bids to wrest back the crown he lost in 2022 in Eugene, Oregon.

“For me, the men’s shot put from 2019 onwards has been absolutely unmissable,” said Coe earlier in August. “Ryan Crouser, Tom Walsh, Joe Kovacs – and Crouser is in the form of his life again.’‘

Coe, re-elected unopposed on Thursday as head of track and field’s governing body for a third and final term, said later it was “unlikely” that athletes from Russia and Belarus would be welcomed back to competition before the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Russian and Belarusian athletes have been banned “for the foreseeable future” since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That includes the option of competing as a neutral.

Their absence has not been felt in shot put, where New Zealand’s 2017 world champion Walsh and Kovacs have played their roles but it has been the genial giant Crouser – generally to be seen wearing a stetson, a habit from the Oregon native’s university days in Texas – who has taken the event onto another plane.

World-record holder Crouser hails from a family of throwers. He may have been raised in a town called Boring but the opposite could be said of his sporting career.

Having toyed with basketball, Crouser may have felt he owed it to his late grandfather Larry to opt for shot put after he launched one effort so far, as a youngster, it went through the roof of his shed.

Korean War veteran Larry would chainsmoke while his grandson practised in his garden but Crouser’s uncle Brian, a two-time Olympian in the javelin, said there was no pressure for him to choose the shot put.

Ryan’s father and coach Mitch may have missed out on appearing in an Olympics – he was a discus alternate for the US 1984 Olympic team – but he has experienced what it is like to win gold, thanks to his son’s triumphs in Rio in 2016 and then in Tokyo in 2021.

“To have multiple Olympians in one family is very cool,” Ryan Crouser said. “But to have a family of throwers who really, truly appreciate the hard work that goes into not only making a team, but winning a medal, it’s very special.”

If there is, though, one member of his family aside from Mitch who Crouser feels he owes the most to, it is Larry.

He was able to tell him he had broken the world record in the 2021 Olympic trials – though he had to write it down as, by that stage, 86-year-old Larry was deaf.

However, his Tokyo gold came a few days after Larry died and an emotional Crouser held up a card: ‘Grandpa, we did it. 2020 Olympic champion’.

“That was the last note I wanted to write to him,” said Crouser.

He had done it in style too, launching the second longest throw of all time, having already at the 2016 Games broken the nearly three-decade-old Olympic record of Ulf Timmerman’s.

“I watched that throw probably 10,000 times and I thought that was one of the most beautiful throws I’d ever seen,” said Crouser of Timmermans’s 1988 Olympic throw.

“To break that record at the Olympics is truly special.”

Larry’s advice has never been far from Crouser’s head and one phrase has stuck with him.

“It’s not how you end up. It’s how you get there.”

Thus far, Crouser can say he has travelled well. AFP