Modern Discobolus

The shadows of early evening were creeping across Brussels' Stadium last week as a hulking U.S. Army lieutenant in trackman's flimsies stepped into the discus ring. At the international military championships, Jay Silvester was having a bad day: his first three throws had fallen disappointingly short, and his grip had slipped on the fourth. In the 8-ft.-2 1/2-in. circle. Silvester swung his right arm back and coiled for one more try. With a grunting explosion of breath, he whirled around, gathering momentum, and let the wood-and-metal discus fly. Out past the 50-meter marker it soared, past the little stakes that marked the best efforts of his competitors, past the red world record flag. When it finally hit the turf 199 ft. 2 1/2 in. away, Jay Silvester had his second world record in nine days, had come within a palm's breadth of 200 ft.--one of track-and-field's few surviving "insurmountable" barriers.

Across the Alpheus. Muscular, 230-lb. Jay Silvester. 24, is the latest and best in a line of discus throwers that reaches back more than 25 centuries to ancient Greece. A regular pentathlon event at the original Olympic Games, the discus throw was immensely popular among Greek youths, who found workouts with the diskos (literally: something to throw) ideal for developing handsome muscles of shoulder and arm. These first discus throwers--among them Phayllus (95 ft.), Protesilaus (100 cubits) and Phlegyas (who tossed it clear across the Alpheus River) --stood on a balbis, or pedestal, and with little windup simply hurled the discus as far as they could. When the event was revived for the 1896 Olympics in Athens, competitors faithfully followed the ancient Grecian style, pedestal and all. But this produced unsatisfactory results (the winning throw that year was 95 ft. 7 1/2 in.), and the modern discobolus stepped down from the balbis into a throwing ring, and developed a new technique that relies as much on centrifugal force as on sheer strength.

Like his colleagues. Jay Silvester does not really throw the discus at all. Spinning dizzily in the circle, he builds up centrifugal force, then lets the discus sail from his hand. Thus propelled, the 4-lb.-6.4-oz. discus soars to distances never dreamed of by the ancient Greeks.

Into the Pasture. Jay Silvester turned discobolus as an eighth-grader: handed the discus of an older friend, he skimmed it 30 ft. into a pasture on his father's Tremonton, Utah. farm. In high school, tall (6 ft. 2 in.) and long of arm, he set records in the shot-put (58 ft. 3 7/8 in.) and discus (170 ft. 4 1/2 in.) that still stand. At Utah State University, he sent the discus on trajectories exceeding 180 ft. from the awkward spraddle that marks his stance.

Last June Silvester won a place on the touring U.S. track squad that competed against the Soviet Union in Moscow. But at first he performed poorly. "I wanted to do very well," he says, "but I couldn't sleep. The time difference upset me. I didn't like the food. I didn't drink any water for fear of dysentery, so I had cotton mouth."

Finally. Silvester overcame a disqualifying tendency to step out of the circle, began to find his form. In Helsinki, he hit 194 ft. 6 in., just 2 ft. 1/2 in. off the world record set in 1959 by Poland's Edmund Piatkowski. Fortnight ago in Frankfurt, he broke the record convincingly with a heave of 198 ft. 7 in. Not content with last week's record toss in Brussels.Silvester intends to stay in the throwing ring until he has flung the discus past that magic barrier of 200 ft.

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