2024 Olympics: Remembering South Africa's high jump world champion Jacques Freitag

The 2024 Olympics are in full swing and one of the main events of the Games, the high jump, will start on the 2^nd of August, with women's qualification commencing.

At this year's Olympics, there will be a sombre mood among the high jump athletes after the tragic passing of former high jump world champion Jacques Freitag.

Freitag, a former world champion high jumper, was found dead on the 1st of July. Before being found, Freitag had been missing for over two weeks.

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According to the Independent Online, Freitag's body was discovered in a veld in Pretoria West with multiple gunshot wounds.

Since retiring from his athletics career in the mid-2000s, the former high jumper got involved with drugs and even spent three days behind bars for possession of drugs.

According to the Afrikaans Newspaper, Freitag's sister, Lewis, said: "We weren't close at all over the last few years because of the drugs. I am a single mother and have had to look after my kids and protect them. He has been on drugs for most of the time."

Before he retired from athletics, Freitag was a prominent athlete for South Africa, winning the 2003 High Jump World Championship and competing at the 2004 Olympic Games in Greece.

According to the World Athletics website, Freitag is in a group of ten athletes to win individual world titles at U18, U20, and senior level, with his first gold being at the 1999 U18 World Championships in Bydgoszcz, days after turning 17.

In 2000, the South African dominated the high jumping scene at the youth level, winning 14 of 15 events and securing the U20 World Championship in Santiago de Chile.

In early 2002, he set an African high jumping record of 2.37m before landing a senior World Championship gold in 2003, with a height of 2.35m, becoming the first African man to win gold in a field event.

In 2005, he increased his African record to 2.38m, a record that still stands to this day in the high jump. He retired from the sport in 2013.

The Daily Beast reports Freitag's sister claimed his 6ft8 body wouldn't be hard to find. After several weeks of looking and eventually finding him, the police launched a murder investigation.

On the 16^th of July, Rudie Lubbe and Chantelle Oosthuizen were arrested in connection with the murder of the former high jumper, News 24 confirms.

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