Emina Omanovic

Happy birthday to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s long jumper Emina Omanović, who broke her country’s national record this summer and then took it to a World Championships.

On 5 July in Zagreb, Emina jumped 6.28m — a Bosnian national record, and a national U20 record in the same leap. The mark it replaced had belonged to Tanja Marković since 2015, and she beat it by twenty-one centimetres. Twenty-one centimetres is not an improvement, it is a different category of jump. A week later she was in Craiova taking silver at the Balkan U20 Championships with 6.18m, and later that month she won the senior Bosnian national title in Rogatica. She had already won the national indoor title over the winter.

Then came Eugene. On 5 August she stood on the runway at Hayward Field in the qualifying round of the World U20 Championships and jumped 6.00m — eighteen years old, at the biggest junior meet in the world, in the stadium where the sport holds its most famous meetings. Her own Instagram highlight from the trip is simply titled world u20ch, which tells you exactly what that week meant to her.

She jumps for AK Sarajevo and comes from Ilijaš, a municipality just outside the capital, which has adopted her wholesale — the local council ran an “Ilijaš is with Emina” message before she flew to Oregon. Small towns do that for athletes who put them on a map, and she has: four national titles, two national indoor titles, and a national record that will carry her name for years.

Sretan rođendan, Emina! Želimo ti puno zdravlja, sreće i uspjeha — i još mnogo dalekih skokova u godini pred tobom. 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇧🇦