Setting The Bar: Yukon Olympic High Jumper Vernon Turner's Road To Paris

From Yukon High School to the University of Oklahoma, and now to the Olympics in Paris, it has been quite a journey for 25-year-old high jumper Vernon Turner. 

“He’s been so busy I haven’t got to talk to him a whole lot, but he sent me pictures,” Turner’s mother Melonie Carpenter said.

For Carpenter, it’s not the nerves about her son being halfway across the world that she’s worried about. It’s that moment when he steps on the Olympic apron for the first time: the nerves a mother gets wanting to see her kid succeed.

“I try not to let him know that I’m nervous but yeah, I’m nervous for him,” she said. “He’s excited. He says he’s not nervous at all.”

 Melonie, her husband and daughter will all make the more than 4,800-mile trip to Paris next week. She said she’s grateful to a coworker who sold t-shirts as a fundraiser to get them to the games.

“I’m just excited that he’s getting this opportunity. He’s worked really hard,” Carpenter said.

Melonie said her son entered Yukon High School with his sights set on basketball, dunking the ball by his freshman year.

“Freshman year, coach Ritter was his basketball coach and talked him into doing the high jump, like ‘you’re going to do this’ and so we ended up doing really well,” Melonie said.

“Very quiet kid, very humble kid but at the time when he got on the apron, he changes. He becomes a very confident athlete,” Turner’s Yukon High School Coach Kevin Ritter said.

Turner won Oklahoma high school state championships in his sophomore, junior and senior year at Yukon, an NCAA championship in 2022, and currently holds the OU high jump record at 7 feet 7.75 inches.

“My wife wants to have a watch party. I said ‘babe, he jumps at three in the morning. I don’t think people are gonna show up.’” Coach Ritter said. “She said ‘you never know!’ So I’m sure we’ll be watching him in our house at three in the morning to see how he’s jumping.”

“I’m just excited that he’s getting this opportunity. He’s worked really hard,” Melonie said.

High-jumping events get underway next Thursday. The high jumping finals are next Saturday, on Melonie’s birthday.