Father of the main jump – Sport – Kommersant

Dick Fosbury, an American track and field athlete, who suffered from cancer, died at the age of 77. Of course, it was not his only Olympic victory that made him a legend, but the way he invented the high jump, which turned all ideas about technique in this discipline upside down.

Among the heroes of the Olympic Games in Mexico City, held in 1968, were two American athletes with a strange fate. Both, except for that Olympics, by and large did not win anything prestigious. Both at the same time managed, thanks to their only success, to acquire such a status and such fame that some athletes do not have, hung from head to toe with awards.

One of these athletes was jumper Bob Beamon with his amazing, as they later said for a long time and not very distorting the facts, “flying into the next century.” Beamon’s result – 8.90 m – was half a meter more than the previous world record, and only 1991 managed to improve it. Another is high jumper Dick Fosbury. He did not break the world record of the Soviet genius Valery Brumel – 2.28 – he limited himself to the Olympic record – 2.24, and still made his name rattle as loudly as the name of Beamon. True, in a slightly different context – as the author of not an absolutely wonderful, inexplicable sports trick, but the author of the most, perhaps, a revolutionary change in the “royal” Olympic form.

Memory erases some details, and over time, the misconception has strengthened that Dick Fosbury in Mexico City almost for the first time presented his signature jump to the public, shocking it. This is not entirely true. In fact, back in his school days, as a 16-year-old teenager, he wondered if it was possible to overcome the high jump bar in a different way than the most advanced ones in the 1960s – well, let’s say, “flip over”. The guy was not embarrassed by the fact that he could not see an alternative. “Flip-over” – with a repulsion of the leg closest to the bar and a swing of the far one, the position of the body face down at the peak – it looks so natural. Fosbury was embarrassed by his own performance. Lanky, he seemed to be well-built for high jumps, but got stuck at a ridiculous one and a half meters.

And it occurred to him that facing down wasn’t really the ideal body position. It would be better to have the back, arched in a steep arc, “arch” directly above the bar. He repeatedly injured his spine upon landing (soft surfaces were still far from being used everywhere), but stubbornly continued to go in the chosen direction, until four years before the Olympics in Mexico City, the newspaper of his native Medford drew attention to the unknown junior. Its author, having seen competitions with the participation of Fosbury, with irony compared his jumps with the way a frog flops into the water. Of course, he had no idea that the not too flattering verb flop he found would soon enter the official track and field terminology.

But jumping face up was far from Dick Fosbury’s only innovation.

Already in his student years, having added, he brought to perfection a new take-off technique. The point was to abandon the “scissors” – alternate leg swings, push off not near, but far, and not close to the racks, but more than a meter from them. The scientific basis for such an adjustment is now clear to anyone who is familiar with physics at a more or less advanced level. The jump path is a parabola, and its peak point is higher the longer it is. But the fact is that even before the Mexican Olympics, Dick Fosbury’s eccentricities were viewed with suspicion. They did not bring him grandiose successes, and much more authoritative experts than the Medford newspapermen continued to make fun of the American.

Gold put an end to the jokes and instantly opened the trend for the jump he invented. Four years later, at the Olympics in Munich, 28 out of 40 participants in the high jump tournament looked into the sky while conquering the bar. And even the fact that in 1972 everyone was beaten by the representative of the USSR, Yuri Tarmak, who remained faithful to the “change over” option, did not stop the revolution. Soon, the old varieties of jumping were mercilessly thrown into the trash, leaving room only for the “fosbury flop”, the fruit of the insight of a failed schoolboy.

Alexey Dospekhov