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Makusha, who missed a bronze medal at the last Olympic Games in Beijing, China, in August 2008 by a whisker in the same long jump event, came good this time around, coming third with a good leap of 8.29 metres.
Phillips walked away with the gold after soaring to an 8,45m gold medal-winning jump while Watt settled for silver in 8,33m.
By winning, Phillips retained his long jump title at the world championships.
The 33-year-old, who also won world titles in 2003 and 2005 and bronze in 2007, took another gold medal yesterday with a season’s best of 8,45m.
NGONI MAKUSHA
Phillips was joined on the winners’ podium by Makusha who came third.
This is a phenomenal achievement for a young man who was plucked from Zimbabwe’s rural area of Seke, just outside the sprawling town of Chitungwiza.
Makusha, who turned professional in June this year, had qualified for yesterday’s long jump final by recording 8,11m in one of his three qualification jumps on Thursday.
His jump was the joint fourth-best result of the day’s men’s long jump qualification rounds, putting him in a good position ahead of yesterday’s final.
Yesterday’s men’s long jump championship event featured 12 finalists from the United States (Phillips and Will Claye), Australia (Watt), Germany (Christian Reif and Sebastian Bayer), Morocco (Yahya
Berrabah), South Africa (Luvo Manyonga), Portugal (Macos Chuva), Russia (Aleksandr Menkov), Great Britain (Christopher Tomlinson), Korea (Deokhyeon Kim) and Zimbabwe (Makusha).
And Makusha showed no ghost of inferiority complex in this strong field as he stood his ground to walk away with a bronze medal.
The finalists were each given six attempts and Makusha recorded his bronze-medal-winning jump of 8,29m in his first attempt of the day.
He later jumped 8,15m, 8,14m, 8,00m and 8,07m in his next four jumps but he had already secured a third place finish behind Phillips and Watt.
However, Makusha’s jump of 8,29m was outside his personal best of 8,40m, attained when winning the National Collegiate Athletics Association long jump title in the United States in June this year.
But the young Zimbabwean must have been satisfied with his overall performance in yesterday’s final in which he carved his name into the annals of the country’s athletics history.
Makusha atoned for his disappointing outing in the men’s 100m event earlier at the World Athletics Championships in Daegu where he only managed to go as far as the semi-finals.
He “regrouped” ahead of his favourite event, the long jump, and he did not disappoint.
Makusha’s fellow United States-based teammate Gabriel Mvumvure choked once again at the grand stage when he failed to qualify for today’s final of the men’s 200m event at the same World Athletics Championships yesterday.
Just like what he did in the 100m, Mvumvure came-a-cropper in the 200m event, going out in yesterday morning’s heats after another poor display on the track.
Mvumvure finished sixth and second last in heat five in 21.11 seconds, blowing away any chance he had of qualifying for last night’s semi-finals.
Heat five was won by Jamaica’s Nickel Ashmeade in 20.47 seconds and he came home ahead of Brazilian Sandro Viana (20.62) and Japan’s Hitoshi Saito (20.80).
Ashmeade, Viana and Saito pulled through to the semis from heat five ahead of Briton James Ellington (20.82), American Jeremy Dodson (20.92), Mvumvure (21.11) and Calvin Dascent (21.15) of Virgin Islands who also ran in the same qualifying race yesterday morning.
Online Reporter