Viki Rusnakova

Happy birthday to Slovakia’s jumper Viktória Rusnáková, a conference champion in the United States who was coached, for the whole of her childhood, by both of her parents.

Viki is the **2024 Conference USA outdoor triple jump champion**, won in El Paso for Middle Tennessee State, where she is now a senior. She has a long jump best of 6.03m and a triple jump best of 12.49m, set in Nashville in May, and she has been on the Conference USA podium indoors as well, with a long jump bronze in Lynchburg. She also holds the **Conference USA Commissioner’s Academic Medal**, which requires a cumulative grade point average above 3.75 — a distinction plenty of athletes never come close to.

At home she has **fifteen Slovak national titles** across the age groups, in the triple jump, the long jump, the shot put, the hurdles and the pentathlon, plus senior national silvers in both horizontal jumps. And she holds a **Slovak national record**: the U16 indoor pentathlon, 3,368 points, set in Bratislava in March 2019, when she was fourteen. She broke the previous record by seventy-five points and won the championship by four hundred and forty-nine.

The family part is the story. Her father **Jaroslav Rusnák** is a former high jumper who co-founded AK Slávia TU Košice and is its head coach. Her mother **Henrieta** is a former international race walker, coaches at the Košice sports school, and is the club’s president. Between them they coached her from the beginning. Then at nineteen she left it all and went to Tennessee.

Her own account of a recent competition tells you what kind of jumper she is: three fouls roughly a centimetre past six metres, five jumps inside a seven-centimetre range, and one observation — the consistency suggests that outdoors it could fly a long way.

Všetko najlepšie k narodeninám, Viki! Veľa šťastia, zdravia, lásky a ešte veľa dlhých skokov. Živió! 🎂🎁🎉🫶🫶🇸🇰