How One Jumper Replaced a Whole Sport's Technique

On October 20, 1968, Dick Fosbury cleared 2.24 meters at the Mexico City Olympics by sprinting up to the bar, twisting in mid-air, and going over headfirst on his back. His gold medal jump looked, to most spectators, like a man falling. Sportswriters called it the Fosbury Flop and assumed it was a one-off stunt.

The straddle technique that Fosbury beat had dominated for decades. Jumpers approached the bar at an angle, kicked one leg up, and rolled face-down across, keeping their center of mass roughly above the bar at the apex.

Fosbury's back-arching trick did something subtler. By bending his torso into a curve as he passed over, he kept his center of mass below the bar even at the high point. A jumper using the flop can clear a height his own body never actually reaches.

The technique only became practical after a specific piece of infrastructure: deep foam landing pits, which started replacing sand and sawdust in the mid-1960s. You cannot land on your neck in sand. Fosbury, a kid from Medford, Oregon, had been quietly refining the move on the new pits at Oregon State.

By the 1980 Olympics, 13 of the 16 high jump finalists used the flop. By 2000, the straddle was extinct at the elite level. One athlete, one Games, one rule of physics most coaches had simply never noticed.