Dick Fosbury

Richard Douglas Fosbury (March 6, 1947 – March 12, 2023) was an American high jumper who changed the sport forever by going over the bar backward. That move, now called the Fosbury flop, won him the gold medal at the 1968 Olympics. Instead of facing the bar, he ran at it diagonally, then curved and launched himself backward, which kept his center of mass lower than any previous technique allowed. Almost every high jumper since has copied him. He never made it back to the Olympics, but stayed active in athletics and sat on the executive board of the World Olympians Association. In 2018, he was elected Blaine County Commissioner and started the job in 2019.

Fosbury was born in Portland, Oregon. At sixteen, while at Medford High School, he started messing around with a new way to jump because he couldn’t get the hang of the standard methods. In his sophomore year, he couldn’t even clear five feet, the usual qualifying height for meets. The dominant technique then was the straddle method, where you go over face-down and lift each leg separately. Fosbury found that too complicated, so he tried other approaches. He later said he knew he had to change his body position, and that started a revolution that took two years to evolve.

First, he tried the upright scissors method, where you run straight at the bar and lift your legs one at a time. The rules only say you have to take off from one foot; nothing dictates how you cross the bar. As he played with this, he kept adjusting it to feel more natural and get more height. Early on, one historian called his attempts an “airborne seizure.” But by the end of his sophomore year and into his junior year, it started working, and he cleared higher bars. Gradually, he shifted until, by his senior year, he was going over backward, head first, arching his body and kicking his legs up. That meant landing on his back, but his high school had replaced the old wood chip pit with softer material just before his junior year, so he could land safely.

That switch to foam rubber was happening across the U.S. in the early 1960s. Before that, pits were filled with sawdust, sand, or wood chips, which worked because scissors jumpers landed on their feet and straddle jumpers used a three-point landing on hands and one leg. Colleges started using foam rubber bundles in the late 1950s, raising the landing surface about three feet. High schools followed in the early 1960s. The softer, higher pit let Fosbury land safely, though he did compress a couple of vertebrae in the mid-1960s when some schools still couldn’t afford the upgrade. He recovered.

His coaches first pushed him to stick with the straddle method, but gave up when his results kept improving. As a junior, he broke his school record with a 6 ft 3 in jump. The next year, he took second in the state at 6 ft 5.5 in. The name “Fosbury Flop” came from a 1964 newspaper photo captioned “Fosbury Flops Over Bar,” and a reporter wrote he looked like “a fish flopping in a boat.” Another paper called him the “World’s Laziest High Jumper.”

After high school in 1965, he went to Oregon State University. His coach, Berny Wagner, thought the western roll would work better and had Fosbury practice that old technique through his first year, though he let him use the flop in freshman meets. The debate ended in his second year when Fosbury cleared 6 ft 10 in at his first meet, smashing the school record. Wagner then gave up, studied the flop on film, and even started teaching it to younger jumpers. National sports media took notice. Fosbury appeared on the cover of *Track and Field News* in February 1968 and won the NCAA title that year.