AND died 76-year-old Dick Fosbury, American athlete who won gold at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and who is remembered above all for the high jump technique still in use, with which you jump “backwards”, with your back facing towards the auction, which made him one of the most influential figures in the history of track and field.
Fosbury in 2012 (Manuel Queimadelos Alonso/Getty Images)
Fosbury, whose name was Richard Douglas but who was known as Dick, was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1947 and had begun experimenting with new jumping techniques as a teenager, since with the then most widespread style – known as the ventral , because the pole was passed with the belly towards it – it was difficult to achieve satisfactory results. Over time he perfected the technique that still bears his surname and which began to bear it in the 1960s, when it was shown and told by a local newspaper. Other American athletes, more or less in the same period, began to use that same style, without however arriving at his results, at least not before Fosbury.
The Fosbury style – dorsal: in which the body rotates in the air while jumping, with a final landing on the back – was also made possible by the fact that in those years softer mats were spreading on which to fall, which was essential to be able to do it on your back (before you often landed on the sand).
The Fosbury style was often criticized and even ridiculed at first, but it was quite effective: first for Fosbury and then for almost all male and female high jumpers. Thanks to that style, in 1968 she won the Olympic high jump competition and set a new Olympic record at 2.24 meters, a height she surpassed on her third and final attempt.
(Tony Duffy /Allsport)
Already four years later, at the Munich Olympics – in which he did not participate, having retired in the meantime – more than two thirds of the athletes jumped with the Fosbury technique. In the seventies the style ventralwhich in turn had replaced the so-called “scissors” jump continued to resist, allowing important victories and even a new world record, but over time the Fosbury style prevailed.
For the first 72 years at the Olympic Games, athletes jumped forwards in the high jump 🏃
Then, at Mexico 1968, Dick Fosbury came along with his “Fosbury flop” and changed the sport forever 🙌pic.twitter.com/AZOwrV6scA
— AW (@AthleticsWeekly) March 13, 2023