The man who changed the high jump forever has died

The former American athlete Dick Fosburythe 1968 Mexico Olympic champion who revolutionized the high jump with a technique that created a school and now bears a name, the fosbury flop, died Sunday at age 76, his agent announced Monday.

“It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that my longtime friend and client Dick Fosbury passed away peacefully in his sleep early Sunday morning after a brief relapse of lymphoma,” Ray Schulte wrote on Instagram .

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Richard Douglas Fosbury, born in Portland on March 6, 1947, was a powerhouse in various team sports, but later turned to track in high school. He wasn’t a very high jumper in the jumping styles that were popular at the time, the ventral roller or the scissor style, and his coach told him to improvise. And from 1963 he started working on a new technique that would be known as the ‘fosbury flop.

It consists of running towards the bar following a curved trajectory, in such a way that the final approach is made transversal to it, and attacking it from behind, successively passing the head, the attacking arm, the back arched and legs bent to extended. they went out. last moment. With this style, the lanky 1.93 athlete won the NCAA indoor championships in 1968 and earned a victory at the trials that earned him a spot on the USA Olympic team in Mexico’68.

And in the Olympic event he became a great athletic sensation with Bob Beamon’s 8.90 in the long jump when with that technique he invented he surprised the favorites Gavrilov and Carruthers, setting an Olympic record with 2.24 m that lasted until Montreal’ 76, the best world mark of the year and hung the gold after passing the bar on his third attempt.

After being proclaimed Olympic champion in Mexico, Fosbury continued to compete for a while, but retired at age 25, only to suffer the disappointment of not qualifying for the USA at the Munich Games to defend his gold and continue his university studies in civil engineering. , profession to which he dedicated himself.

Although he never beat Soviet Valeri Brumel’s world record of 2.28 from 1963 -in the ventral roll technique- the effectiveness of the new method made it quickly gain popularity among high jump coaches and the following generations of athletes has begun. use it regularly. In fact today no one uses a different method than the fosbury flop which was born 55 years ago.