Flop Heard ‘Round the World

It’s impossible to watch the track and field events of these 2008 Olympics without pausing to wonder again at Dick Fosbury and his audacious – and innovative – conquest of the high jump event at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. 

Under nearly any circumstances, improved athletic performance is a game of hundredths of seconds, of hairsbreadths, of fractions of an ounce.  But something in young Richard Fosbury prompted him to improve his performance by leaps and bounds (no pun intended) in a single stroke that year.  One has to imagine this fledgling engineer from Medford, OR grew impatient with gradual and subtle improvement and so turned the whole concept of high jumping on its head.  (Okay, that pun was intended.) 

At the time, jumpers took off from their inside foot and swung their outside foot up and over the bar. Perhaps it was the hard sandpit landings that were required before the advent of deep foam matting that prevented jumpers from even considering a reckless head-first leap.  Or maybe it was just Fosbury’s savvy redefinition of the task – from jumping over to getting over – that cleared the way for his disruptive and revolutionary innovation.

Whatever it was, it was fascinating.  Even those of us ordinarily uninterested in track and field sat glued to the TV screen in the hope of catching another view of this weird gangly kid and his goofy method.  Instead of running straight at the bar and then leaping, jumping or stepping over it, feet first and facing forward. . . Fosbury approached at an angle and threw himself headfirst and backwards over it!! While the coaches of the world shook their heads in disbelief, the Mexico City audience was absolutely captivated, shouting “Olé” as he cleared the bar each time. Fosbury cleared every height through 2.22 meters without a miss and then achieved a personal record of 2.24 meters to win the gold medal.

“Can he do that?” we’d ask.  Surely there’s a rule . . . .

Well, there wasn’t a rule.  But there were certainly centuries of precedent.  Is it wisdom or naivete that allows us to sweep aside centuries of “doing it this way” long enough to see a better way? 

By 1980, 13 of the 16 Olympic finalists were using the Fosbury flop.