Ja’Kobe Tharp breaks 110m hurdles world record at NCAA athletics championships
The 20-year-old’s performance with a legal tailwind of one metre per second pushed China’s Liu Xiang down to the seventh-fastest of all time
Ja’Kobe Tharp clocked 12.75 seconds to smash the 110m hurdles world record during heats at the NCAA collegiate athletics championships in Eugene, Oregon, on Wednesday.
Tharp wiped out the long-standing previous record of 12.80 seconds set by fellow American Aries Merritt in Brussels on September 7, 2012.
The record also pushed China’s Liu Xiang’s 12.88 seconds in 2006 down to the seventh-fastest of all time.
Run with a legal tailwind of one metre per second, the performance also shattered Grant Holloway’s NCAA collegiate record of 12.98 seconds set in 2019.
The 20-year-old Auburn University stand-out came into the meeting with a personal best of 13.01 seconds. He took more than a quarter of a second off that mark.
“I knew I had that in my legs,” Tharp said. “But it wasn’t on my bingo card before this meet, not at all.”