Mutaz Essa Barshim is a 23-year-old Qatari track-and-field athlete who set the world's second-highest high-jump mark of all time with a leap of 2.43 meters at a competition last week in Brussels, Belgium.
The video above shows Barshim's feat, which is quite astonishing. The Photoshopped images below are just working their way around the web now and make it even more astonishing, thanks to some stunning new perspective.
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Barshim's 2.43-meter jump translates to essentially eight feet. So Adam Schmenk of USA Track & Field dusted off the ole Photoshop skills to compare Barshim's leap to two sports that get much more mainstream attention than track and field. The images might not be accurate right down to the inch -- but they are amazing, and useful. Here's Barshim's jump compared to a regulation 10-foot basketball hoop.
With a little more work, Barshim will be able to dunk his own body. Fairly impressive. Meanwhile, here's Barshim juuust clearing an eight-foot soccer goal, again courtesy of Schmenk.
Schmenk says his goal with the Photoshopped images was to spread the golden gospel of track and field as a sport. Mission accomplished, as far as we're concerned. The high-jump world record, if you're wondering, is 2.45 meters, set by Javier Sotomayor of Cuba in 1993.