50 stunning Olympic moments No28: Dick Fosbury introduces 'the flop'

D ick Fosbury’s route into high jump was fairly straightforward: he liked sport, and wasn’t any good at anything else. He hadn’t got into the football team, and despite being one of the tallest kids in school had been no more successful at basketball. He tried athletics and, having had a go at a few disciplines, found this was the one at which he was least useless. But Fosbury still spent many years towards the wrong end of the usefulness scale. He likes to tell a story to illustrate just how average he was before he perfected the technique that was to astonish the world and make his name famous: in the mid-60s, while he was at college. “Someone bet me I couldn’t clear a stuffed leather chair,” he says. “Not only did I lose the bet, I also broke my hand in the crash landing.”

At the time there were two common methods of clearing a bar: the scissors jump, where the athlete threw first one leg and then the other over the bar before landing on his feet, as modelled here by 1920 gold-medallist Richmond Landon, and the straddle, and its variant the western roll, which saw the athlete fling himself over the bar face down, as demonstrated by 1964 winner Valeriy Brumel. The scissors jump had been considered a bit old-hat since the end of the 19th century, when the straddle started to take over. Though the technique had changed a bit over time, there had been no significant alterations since 1936, when the IAAF first decided that athletes didn’t have to clear the bar leg first.

“As a young boy our teacher taught us both the western roll and the scissors style,” Fosbury told me when we discussed his breakthrough in 2008. “I felt more comfortable with the scissors style and used that reasonably well until I reached high school,