Probably no athlete has changed a sport as much as Dick Fosbury, the American jumper who died on March 12 at 76 years old. At the 1968 Olympics Fosbury won the high jump competition by overcoming the pole backwards, from his back: before him no one had done it at those levels and within a few years everyone ended up jumping with that technique, which for decades his name is like him.
Initially Fosbury was criticized and even laughed at. He had developed that new style because with the traditional method it didn’t yield much, and also thanks to the fact that in the meantime mattresses had been introduced on which one could land on his back in complete safety. In this way he did something so unique that he became a model for game changerthe innovator par excellence in the world of sport.
(Tony Duffy/Allsport)
In addition to the speed and relevance of his innovation – already at the 1972 Olympics most of the athletes jumped like him – Fosbury is remembered above all because that style was immediately and irrefutably called by his name.
With a smaller scope than Fosbury, and at Fosbury, there have been many other similar cases in the history of sport. Sometimes they were seemingly trivial gestures, but with their effect. In other cases, however, great innovations have spread with technical and more descriptive names, and in still other cases certain potential innovations have stalled due to not having passed the initial phase, that of criticism and sometimes derision.
In football there is no shortage of examples of various kinds. The “Cruijff turnaround” for example, or in Italy the “Del Piero goals”, those scored by kicking back in the way Alessandro Del Piero scored several goals, often decisive, starting in the 1990s.
Similarly, what is known in Italy as a “cucchiaio”, i.e. a penalty kicked with a slow and very risky lob, which became famous with Francesco Totti at the 2000 European Championships, is called abroad doll, because he was associated with Antonin Panenka, who in 1976 thus took the decisive penalty that made Czechoslovakia win the only European championships in its history. The footballer Renato Cesarini instead became known for when he scored the goals: often at the end of the game, in what is still called the “Cesarini area”.
Besides football, two important cases of gestures named after those who made them for the first time come from figure skating. It is the case of the TRotola Biellmann, an element in which you turn around on one foot, while the other is held with two hands above the head. It is called that for the Swiss skater Denise Biellmann, who popularized it in the seventies and eighties, even if it had already been proposed in some competitions before.
(Matthew Stockman/Allsport/Getty Images)
Even more famous is the Axel, a type of jump that over the years has become double, triple and even quadruple. It has the peculiarity of being done forward rather than backward like all the others, and owes its name to Axel Paulsen, a Norwegian skater who already proposed it at the end of the 19th century: it was so innovative and original that it took about thirty years before other skaters managed to replicate it in competition.
Similar cases are also found in other disciplines somewhat similar to skating, such as artistic and rhythmic gymnastics. One above all Yurchenko, a vault that owes its name to the Soviet gymnast Natalia Yurchenko, who introduced it in the 1980s and about which the Olympics website he wrote that “it is difficult to quantify its impact in the world of artistic gymnastics”.
(Emilee Chinn/Getty Images)
In athletics something similar to what Fosbury did was done by the American Parry O’Brien, winner of two Olympic gold medals in the shot put in the 1950s. After studying with intent, O’Brien developed a way to set up the catapult effect needed to throw the weight as far as possible. Even in his case his back had something to do with it, because it was his back that he presented himself on the platform, so that he could turn 180 degrees before the launch. In turn, in the 1970s, however, the O’Brien technique had to deal with a rotational technique introduced by the Soviet Aleksandr Baryšnikov, who developed it inspired by discus throwing.
In the case of the shot put the question is still open, because although the roundabout technique is now prevalent, the O’Brien technique – with which its inventor made 16 world records, three of which in the space of a few minutes – continues to be used: in short, it depends on tastes, preferences and above all on the build of the weightlifters.
(AP Photo)
However, the invention or introduction of something new, however big or small, does not always lead to the identification of that something with a proper name. In tennis, for example, the now established two-handed backhand, which made the shots more powerful and effective, is not named after any of its first users: Chris Evert, Bjorn Borg or Jimmy Connors. The coup, which someone happened to do already at the beginning of the twentieth century, only began to spread in the seventies and really asserted itself only starting from the nineties.
There are also cases in which certain innovations, even those whose main architect could be traced, are given descriptive names that do not say much: in recent years it has happened in football with “the crocodile” and in tennis with “the Frog”. In the first case, it is the choice to have a player lie down behind his teammates on the barrier, so that any low shot goes towards him instead of towards the goal; “la rana” is instead the name with which the magazine racket presented a set of gestures with which the Polish Iga Swiatek sometimes tried to distract or displace her opponents.
Another example of a different way of doing things is in basketball free throws and is typically called a “granny shot”. It is performed by shooting for a basket with the hands down, below the waist rather than above the head, as a child would do or as those unfamiliar with the gesture tend to do. This shot, that sometimes still sees itself on some basketball courts, in some ways and for some athletes it is, or at least could become, more effective than the style used for the most part.
The fact is that, as its name suggests, the granny throw is considered ridiculous to see and demeaning to perform. It has been since Rick Barry began proposing it in the sixties, although Barry is still today one of the most effective free throwers in the history of the NBA and despite the low shots contributed to the record for points scored in a game by a player. Of Barry’s five sons, all of whom became professional players, only one has retained their father’s approach to free throw shooting. And Shaquille O’Neal, a player who had big free throw problems, once said, “I’d rather miss them all than shoot them from underneath.”
(AP Photo/Ron Irby)
In addition to the innovations that have made it and those too strange to succeed, the history of sport also has several examples of innovations so extreme, or at the limits of the permitted, that they have forced those responsible to rewrite the rules and change the regulations. In its small way, the Italy of rugby did it a few years ago, which in trying to surprise the highly favored England away, interpreted in an original way a rule relating to offside and open scrums. It was not an absolute novelty and Italy did not win the match, but the effects were so destabilizing as to completely throw their opponents off balance, giving rise to moments that fans still remember today. A year later, however, the World Rugby Federation changed the regulation, also to prevent something similar from happening again.
– Read also: The things you don’t notice in sports crests