The Jump That Changed High Jumping

On October 20, 1968, in Mexico City, a lanky 21-year-old from Oregon named Dick Fosbury cleared 2.24 meters by running at the bar in a curve and going over backward. The judges had no rule against it. Most of the press thought he looked like a man falling out of a window. He took the gold and set a new Olympic record, 2 centimeters above the previous mark of 2.20.

The trick was geometry. The high jumpers Fosbury beat that day used the straddle: belly down, body draped over the bar, every kilogram of them passing above it. To clear two meters with the straddle, your center of mass has to clear two meters too. Fosbury's back-arch did something stranger. With his hips pushed up and his head and feet hanging lower, his center of mass traced a line that actually passed under the bar, even as his body went over.

The move wasn't quite new. There's footage of a backward flop at the 1906 Olympics. What was new was the landing pit. Until the late 1950s, high jumpers came down on sand or low matting, and you didn't try anything that landed you on your spine. U.S. colleges started piling up loose foam rubber, and by the early 1960s high schools were following. Fosbury's school in Medford, Oregon, got its foam pit before his junior year. He was 16, experimenting with the old scissors kick, when he realized he could lean back further and further into the new pad without breaking himself.

Within a decade the straddle was extinct at the elite level. The rule book never mentioned the technique. The foam did.