What is the ‘Fosbury Flop’?



Dick Fosbury was a teenager who liked to high jump. In those days jumpers just ran up to the bar and jumped clearing their legs, their body and then their head. This was known as the scissors technique.



Sixteen-year-old Fosbury was frustrated with the traditional technique. He thought he could lower the resistance of gravity by jumping backwards and he developed a technique to do so.



Almost at once his records improved. Earlier he could clear only 1.65 m, now he could clear 1.78 m.



In 1964 he passed the 2 m mark. He represented the USA in the 1964 Olympics in Mexico. There he was, an unknown athlete competing against world class jumpers, all of whom used the scissors style. One by one, they were left behind, as Fosbury cleared 2.24 m to take the gold with a new Olympic record.



Nobody had heard of Dick Fosbury before the Olympics but by the end of the Games his name was on everyone’s lips. Fosbury’s coach warned that imitators could end up with broken necks. However all the world’s leading high jumpers abandoned their old techniques and started using the ‘Fosbury Flop’. Four years later at the 1972 Munich Olympics nobody using the traditional technique had qualified. By 1976 nobody remembered the traditional technique. Everyone was using the ‘Fosbury Flop’.



 



Picture Credit : Google