“When we were going for a medal, the crowd was completely silent and focused on my attempts each time that I jumped,” Fosbury said. He broke the Olympic record with it, clearing 2.24 meters for gold. The term “Fosbury Flop” was coined by the Medford Mail Tribune newspaper, which ran the caption, “Fosbury flops over the bar,” according to “The Wizard of Foz,” a 2018 book that Fosbury co-wrote.įosbury said he was the only person doing the flop at the 1968 Olympics. Happy birthday to Dick Fosbury, the man who changed high jump forever. “I’ve seen some unorthodox styles of jumping before, and none of them panned out.” “When we first saw him, we were saying, ‘Oh man, what a nutcase here with this guy,'” 1968 Olympic silver medalist Ed Caruthers said in 2017. In the mid-1960s, Fosbury estimated that 95% of high jumpers used the western roll or straddle technique, where an athlete would throw an arm and a leg over the bar and go over on their belly. “I improved a half a foot that day just by changing my body position from sitting over the bar into a back layout.” I was the worst guy in the entire district in the high jump,” Fosbury said. “Up until that time, my coach had been trying to teach me to use the straddle technique. He said he first used it an April 1963 meet, soon after turning 16 years old. “I changed that style and modernized it to make it more efficient.” “I converted the old ‘scissors’ style, where a jumper would hurdle over the bar, and their legs would do a scissor kick,” he said in a 2017 interview for the NBC Sports film “1968” on the Mexico City Olympics. Dick Fosbury, who won the 1968 Olympic high jump title using a new, back-first high jump technique known as the Fosbury Flop, died Sunday morning at age 76.įosbury died peacefully after a short bout with a recurrence of lymphoma, according to Schulte Sports Marketing & Public Relations, which had represented him.įosbury was first diagnosed with cancer in 2008.įosbury began working on his “flop” high jump technique as a high school sophomore in Medford, Oregon, and had it fully developed by graduation.
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