Dick Fosbury obituary

It is easily arguable that the most significant technique change in athletics was high jumping’s “Fosbury flop”. Dick Fosbury, who has died aged 76, invented the eponymous unconventional way of getting over the bar. In the words of the American coach John Tansley, “he literally turned his event upside down”, but besides the sport, the flop’s impact as a paradigm change was even more remarkable.

For millennia, humans had proceeded over obstacles in their paths one foot at a time. Even as the sport of athletics was refined, high jumpers basically followed the techniques of hurdlers and steeplechasers without considering that they, unlike those runners, did not have to continue to propel themselves forward after their jumps. The early “scissors” technique was essentially a hurdle of the bar; the later techniques, the “straddle” and various rolls, looked the way their names implied. High jumpers preceding Fosbury were tall but strong, like sprinters, in the upper body.

The “flop” – which you can see hints of in the twisting rolls of great jumpers who preceded him, Charlie Dumas, John Thomas or Valeriy Brumel – did not come to Fosbury in a “eureka” moment, but as he tinkered with his traditional technique while still at high school in the early 1960s. He found himself moving his body more and more sideways, until finally he was jumping with his back to the bar, body parallel to the ground, and legs perpendicular to it. As his head and torso went over, he would kick his legs high, landing face up on his shoulders. The jump began to describe a parabola.

Despite his coach’s scepticism, the results were evident, and when a photo in the local paper was captioned “Fosbury Flops Over Bar”, the jump had acquired its name. Finishing