An Oregon Engineering Student Reinvented the High Jump in Public

On 20 October 1968 in Mexico City, an awkward, lanky 21-year-old from Oregon State cleared 2.24 metres in a way no Olympic gold medallist ever had: head first, back to the bar, eyes on the sky. Dick Fosbury's technique looked, to many in the stadium, like a man tripping over.

He had been working on it since high school. As a junior in Medford, Oregon in 1963, he had been failing with the orthodox "straddle" jump — go over the bar belly-down, swing the trail leg through. The straddle suited the sand-and-sawdust pits then standard, where landing on your back would crack vertebrae. Fosbury, frustrated, started experimenting with rolling backwards.

The timing was lucky. By the mid-1960s, deep foam landing pads had begun replacing sawdust at high schools and colleges in the United States. Foam made it safe to land on your shoulders. Without that change, the Flop would have crippled anyone who tried it.

Fosbury's college coach at Oregon State did not love the style. Berny Wagner allowed it because Fosbury's heights kept rising. By the 1968 NCAA championships, with foam universal, he was clearing world-class bars. Mexico City converted the technique from curiosity to standard.

Biomechanists later worked out why it functioned. Going over backwards lets the jumper's centre of mass pass under the bar even as the body clears it, since the spine arches around the obstacle. The straddle, by contrast, forces a clear-the-bar trajectory. The difference is around 5 to 10 centimetres at elite heights — enough that, by Moscow 1980, almost every finalist had switched.