Ralph Boston, the Olympic long jump champion who, in August 1960, broke the track star Jesse Owens’s 25-year-old world record in the event, and a year later became the first jumper to break the 27-foot mark, died on Sunday at his home in Peachtree City, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. He was 83.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his son Todd said.
Boston dominated the long jump through much of the 1960s by breaking or tying world records six more times over that span. A tall and sinewy Mississippian, he won a gold medal in the Rome Olympics in 1960, a silver medal in Tokyo in 1964 and a bronze in Mexico City in 1968.