On this day, March 6, 1947, Dick Fosbury was born.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Dick Fosbury


Fosbury in 1968

Personal information
Full name: Richard Douglas Fosbury
Born: March 6, 1947; Portland, Oregon, U.S.
Died: March 12, 2023 (aged 76); Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.
Height: 6 ft 4 in (193 cm)
Weight: 183 lb (83 kg)
Event: High jump
College team: Oregon State University

Richard Douglas Fosbury (March 6, 1947 – March 12, 2023) was an American high jumper, who is considered one of the most influential athletes in the history of track and field. He won a gold medal at the 1968 Olympics, revolutionizing the high jump event with a "back-first" technique now known as the Fosbury flop. His method was to sprint diagonally towards the bar, then curve and leap backward over the bar, which gave him a much lower center of mass in flight than traditional techniques. This approach has seen nearly universal adoption since Fosbury's performance in Mexico. Though he never returned to the Olympics, Fosbury continued to be involved in athletics after retirement and served on the executive board of the World Olympians Association.

In 2014, Fosbury unsuccessfully challenged Steve Miller for a seat in the Idaho House of Representatives. Fosbury ran for Blaine County Commissioner against incumbent Larry Schoen in 2018, won the seat, and took office in 2019.

Athletic career

High school and the origins of the Fosbury Flop


A high jumper performing the straddle technique, the first high-jumping technique that Fosbury was taught


Yelena Slesarenko using the Fosbury flop technique.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Fosbury started experimenting with a new high-jumping technique at age 16, while attending Medford High School. Fosbury had difficulty competing using the dominant high-jumping techniques of the period. In his second year, he failed to complete jumps of five feet (1.52 m), the qualifying height for many high-school track meets. This dominant technique, the straddle method, was a complex motion where an athlete went over the high-jump bar facing down, and lifted their legs individually over the bar. Fosbury found it difficult to coordinate all the motions involved in the straddle method, so he began to experiment with other ways of doing the high jump.

Fosbury later recalled, "I knew I had to change my body position and that's what started first the revolution, and over the next two years, the evolution." At first, he tried to use a technique known as the upright scissors method. In this method, a jumper runs upright towards the bar, facing forward, and during their jump lifts their straight legs one at a time over the bar. High-jump rules stipulate only that competitors must jump off one foot at takeoff; there is no rule governing how a competitor crosses the bar, so long as they go over it.

As he began to experiment with this technique, he gradually adapted it to make himself more comfortable and to get more height out of it. Nonetheless, it was nowhere near as coordinated as a well-performed straddle method jump, and one historian has referred to Fosbury's early attempts as an "airborne seizure"; however, during the latter part of his second year and the beginning of his junior year, it began to produce results, and he gradually was able to clear higher jumps.

Gradually, Fosbury shifted his positioning during the jump, such that by his senior year he had begun to go over the bar backward, head-first, curving his body over the bar and kicking his legs up in the air at the end of the jump. This required him to land on his back, but, prior to his junior year, his high school had replaced its wood chip landing pit with a softer material, so he was able to land safely.

Luckily for Fosbury, replacement of landing surfaces with foam rubber was becoming common across the United States in the early 1960s. Sawdust, sand, or woodchip surfaces had been usable previously because jumpers using the scissors technique were able to clear the bar while upright and then land on their feet, while those using the Western Roll or Straddle made a three-point landing on their hands and lead leg. In the late 1950s, U.S. colleges began to use bundles of soft foam rubber, usually held together by a mesh net. These bundles were not only much softer but were also elevated about three feet (0.91 m) off the ground. By the early 1960s, U.S. high schools were following the lead of the colleges in acquiring foam rubber landing pits. With the softer, elevated landing surface, Fosbury was able to land safely.

Fosbury did, however, compress a couple of vertebrae in the mid-1960s because not all high schools could afford the upgraded, foam material. Fosbury recovered from this injury.

Fosbury's coaches at first encouraged him to continue practicing the straddle method, but they abandoned that idea when his marks continued to improve. In his junior year, he broke his high-school record with a 6 ft 3 in (1.91 m) jump, and the next year took second place in the state with a 6 ft 5.5 in (1.969 m) jump.

The technique gained the name the "Fosbury Flop" when in 1964 the Medford Mail-Tribune ran a photo captioned "Fosbury Flops Over Bar," while in an accompanying article a reporter wrote that he looked like "a fish flopping in a boat." Others were even less kind, with one newspaper captioning Fosbury's photograph, "World's Laziest High Jumper".

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Personal life

Fosbury graduated from Oregon State University in 1972 with a degree in civil engineering and was the co-owner of Galena Engineering, Inc. in Ketchum, Idaho, where he lived from 1977.

In March 2008, Fosbury was diagnosed with stage-one lymphoma. He had surgery a month later to remove a cancerous tumor engulfing his lower vertebra. Due to concerns about the tumor's proximity to the spine, it was not completely removed and he was put on a chemotherapy regimen.[28] In March 2009, Fosbury announced that he was in remission. In March 2014 he stated in an interview with the Corvallis Gazette-Times that he was "doing well" and was "clear of cancer."

Fosbury died on March 12, 2023, aged 76, after a short bout with a recurrence of lymphoma; he was survived by his wife Robin.

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The Physics Behind the Fosbury Flop

Everything Science
25.9K subscribers

36,322 views Jun 19, 2020
The Physics Behind the Fosbury Flop

The first Olympics Games were held in Greece in 1896 and have been held every 4 years since. While athletes have gotten stronger and faster, in those 120 years, the core of most events haven’t really changed.

The high jump was one of the 43 events from the original Olympics in 1896. For nearly the first hundred years of the event, runners took one of a few styles to clear the bar; the straddle, Western Roll, Eastern cut-off, or scissor jump.

But in 1968 at the Mexico City Olympic Games, 21-year-old Oregonian Dick Fosbury would make history when he jumped 7 feet 4 and a quarter inches above the ground, the first American to win gold in the event in over a decade. Fosbury would become famous for his unique style, that would come to be known as the Fosbury flop, where a runner turned away from the pole, jumped, and arched their back over the pole headfirst.

Fosbury’s style would become legendary and would revolutionize the event. At the next Olympic games four years later, in 1972, the new Fosbury flop had already become the most commonly used technique amongst the 40 competing Olympians. And of the 44 Olympic gold medalists to compete in the high jump from 1972 through 2016, 42 used the flop including all the new world record setters. Today it remains the most popular technique in modern high jumping.

But how does the Fosbury Flop actually work, and what’s the physics behind this game-changing move.

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In high jump, your centre of mass goes under the bar

Veritasium
15M subscribers

2,148,983 views Aug 8, 2012
The strange thing about high jump is that the technique changed dramatically after 1968, when Dick Fosbury used his trademark flop to win the gold medal at the Olympics in Mexico City.
Previously the scissors and straddle had been the most common jumping technique, but after the introduction of safer landing matts, the new unorthodox Fosbury Flop became the jump of choice. There are good physical reasons for this - the style allows the jumper to pass over the bar while his or her centre of mass actually passes below the bar.

Huge thanks to Elly (Appchat http://bit.ly/NxAMlX ) for filming, editing, and music!

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[pfitz59]

1. I watched him jump in 1968 before the Olympics

The US athletes were training at Echo Summit near Lake Tahoe, which was the same elevation as Mexico City. The athletes had to acclimatize. Was amazing.