Athletics · 1968 · Mexico City, Mexico
The Flop That Rewrote the High Jump
An American college student wins Olympic high jump gold going over the bar backwards, using a technique coaches had spent years mocking, and the event never goes back.
2.24m (Olympic record)
Winning height
"Fosbury Flop"
Technique
Gold
Medal
In 1968 every serious high jumper cleared the bar face-down, using the straddle or the Western roll. Dick Fosbury, a civil engineering student at Oregon State, had spent years on an alternative that looked wrong: run up, turn your back on the bar, arch over it head and shoulders first, land on your upper back and neck.
Commentators and rival coaches called it awkward and, more than once, reckless, and it was only survivable at all because foam landing mats had replaced sand and sawdust pits. In Mexico City he used it to clear 2.24 metres for an Olympic record and the gold medal, ahead of the USSR's Valentin Gavrilov and Ed Caruthers of the United States.
Within a decade the 'Fosbury Flop' was the standard technique everywhere from school sports days to the Olympics, and the straddle style was finished. Fosbury never won another major title. He did not have to: everyone who came after him was jumping his way.
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