42-year-old South African high jump gold medallist Jacques Freitag was discovered with gunshot wounds near a cemetery in Pretoria. The case is being treated as murder by the police, although no arrests have been made yet. Freitag had an impressive athletic career, winning the world under-18 title in 1999 and world under-20 gold in 2000 before claiming the global gold in high jump in 2003 with a height of 2.35m, surpassing athletes from Sweden and Canada.
During his career, his best leap was recorded at 2.38m in 2005. Freitag’s untimely death has shocked the athletics community and investigations into the circumstances surrounding his passing are ongoing. Despite his successes on the track, it remains unclear what led to Freitag’s tragic end.
