Soviet athletes including Saneyev took gold and silver while de Oliveira had to

Soviet athletes, including Saneyev, took gold and silver while de Oliveira had to settle for his second bronze medal.But in spite of his bad luck at the Olympics, he won the IAAF World Cup on three occasions (1977, 1979 and 1981), and three more Pan American gold medals, as well as numerous South American titles including victory at La Paz on 5 November 1981. In the final round de Oliveira jumped as close to his record as he had ever done but it was adjudged a foul. Four years later in Moscow, a politically sensitive event that suffered from the American boycott, the triple jump final was marred by ugly scenes.De Oliveira was whistled and jeered at by the Soviet crowd as he jumped, while the leading non-Soviet contenders de Oliveira and Ian Campbell of Australia were charged by the officials with nine fouls in 12 jumps. At his first Games, in Montreal the following year, he was third with 16.90 metres and finished fifth in the long jump final.

Even now, de Oliveira's mark is a South American record while his personal best long jump of 8.36 metres, set in Rieti in 1979, was also a South American record for 15 years.But although he remained the world record holder throughout his Olympic career, the greatest prize of all proved elusive. He came to the attention of the athletics world at the age of 21 with his world record of 17.89 metres, splashing down in the same sand- pit where, seven years earlier, Bob Beamon had landed after leaping into long jump and Olympic folklore.He had broken the three-year-old record of his great Soviet rival, Viktor Saneyev, by an extraordinary 45 centimetres, and it was another decade before the American Willie Banks took the event a step further. Two years later, at the age of just 27, his career was over following a terrible car crash. De Oliveira was born in Pindamonhangaba, 90 miles north-east of Sao Paulo, in 1954. Like Prudencio, de Oliveira was never Olympic champion, but the world record he set at the 1975 Pan American Games in Mexico City stood for nearly 10 years, and only some highly contentious officiating in Moscow in 1980 deprived him of the Olympic gold medal he so richly deserved.

He belonged to a Brazilian dynasty of triple jumpers that included the twice Olympic champion Adhemar Ferreira da Silva, and the double Olympic medallist Nelson Prudencio, de Oliveira's mentor in his early years. JOAO CARLOS de Oliveira, "Joao do Pulo", or "Jumping Joao", was one of the greatest athletes in South American track and field history. History has been no less forgiving of one of its more extraordinary characters.Nicholas Griffin is the author of `The Requiem Shark' (Little, Brown, 24 June, pounds 16.99). Roberts's motto, "A merry life and a short one", applied not only to himself, but to his crew and his kind. In this case 52 were hanged, a statement that echoed all the way to the Caribbean and effectively put an end to the disturbance of trade through piracy. Usually at a pirate trial, only the Captain or a ringleader would be singled out for hanging. A sudden change in wind left Roberts's ship a sitting duck for the superior force of His Majesty's guns The fight was conceded.

Instead, His Majesty's Swallow faced Roberts's Royal Fortune, during an afternoon thunderstorm in the Bight of Benin. Though two large ships of the line were sent after him, one lost 240 of her 280 men to fevers and abandoned the chase. A village, in modern-day Nigeria, was reduced to ashes and scattered with corpses - so violent an incident that Roberts's name and nature were passed along in oral histories of the Ibo until they were recorded by anthropologists in the 1920s.In the end, Roberts's vast and unruly crew were no match for the organisation of the British Navy. A captured ship burned at sea with a packed hold of slaves aboard. On his last tour of the Gold Coast, his usual order seemed to be missing.

By the time Roberts met with the British Navy his force numbered four ships and several hundred men. Not all islands would trade with pirates, so they often relied on their prey for the most basic necessities: sails, livestock, freshwater.With such success came a growing fleet and inflated numbers of crew. In an afternoon, he sailed amid an armada of 42 merchant ships and seized the richest among them, taking 90,000 gold moidores, a diamond cross intended for the King of Portugal and a cargo of sugar and tobacco Most of the time, his prizes were more modest. England was, of course, dependant on its trading routes, most particularly on the slaving triangle between West Africa, the Caribbean and England.They showed little concern during Roberts's initial forays at the edge of England's colonies, mainly because his one great prize was Portuguese and not English. The two walked hand in hand - the more Roberts interrupted trade, the more interested His Majesty's Navy became in him. Though the man refused, he did file a protest that Roberts relieved him of a prayer book and the crew stole his favourite corkscrew.There were, however, many things that Roberts did share with the brethren of the coast; namely a fondness for gold and an aversion to the British Navy. And in an age when navigation was an art of lethal inaccuracy, Roberts appeared across the globe, mastering his ship from West Africa to Brazil, from the trade heavy waters of the Carib-bean to the fishing grounds of Newfoundland. The articles of his ship were recorded by Captain Charles Johnson, where he is revealed as a democrat (one man, one vote), a health insurer ($800 for a limb lost in service), a man fond of music (fiddlers took Sunday off) and a Captain intolerant of crews smuggling women or boys aboard (death).On one of his last prizes, he made a consolidated effort to woo a clergyman aboard his ship.