Olympic medalists Ashton Eaton, Brianne Theisen-Eaton jointly announce retirement

Olympic medalists Ashton Eaton, Brianne Theisen-Eaton jointly announce retirement

Published Jan. 4, 2017 11:37 a.m. ET

Both two-time Olympic gold medalist Ashton Eaton and his wife, bronze medalist Brianne Theisen-Eaton, announced their retirement from competition in a post on their website on Wednesday morning.

https://twitter.com/AshtonJEaton/status/816672974531010560

Eaton won two gold medals in the decathlon representing the United States at the 2012 and 2016 Games, respectively. In qualifying for London 2012, Eaton achieved a decathlon score of 9039, breaking the previous world record of 9026 points set by Roman Šebrle in 2001.

In Rio 2016, Eaton defended his gold medal, and in doing so tied the Olympic record with a score of 8893.

In his post on their site, Eaton wrote:

...it’s my time to depart from athletics; to do something new. Frankly there isn’t much more I want to do in sport. I gave the most physically robust years of my life to the discovery and pursuit of my limits in this domain. Did I reach them? Truthfully I'm not sure anyone really does. It seems like we tend to run out of time or will before we run out of potential. That makes humanity limitless then, as far as I'm concerned. And I think that's inspiring.

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