At the wonderful University of Oregon, Berny Wagner would review the videos of his student, Dick Fosbury, and say:
– I don’t know, Dick…
And Fosbury was trying again.
He took a few steps back, took a roll, ran crosswise, pushed himself forward and in the air threw himself backwards. With his back arched, he attacked the bar. And, on his back, he fell on the mattress.
No one else was doing this.
No one else in the world.
– I don’t know, Dick.
Fosbury was persistent and stubborn, and he tried and tried, and with each attempt he gained inches. And, encouraged by all that progress, Berny Wagner ended up nodding.
(After all, athletics in Oregon is creative and bold, and that’s where the legendary Steve Prefontaine comes from).
– Come on, let’s try it – ended up saying Wagner.
And with that disruptive style, the Fosbury flop, Dick Fosbury would appear at the Games of Mexico’68, those of Bob Beamon, Tommie Smith and John Carlos – what Games those!–, to rise up to 2.24 m, break the Olympic record and universally institute the new style: goodbye to the scissor style and belly jump.
Dick Fosbury died this Sunday, victim of lymphoma.
He was 76 years old.
(…)
It wasn’t like that before.
Before Fosbury, the scissor style was applied (less and less; this technique was becoming outdated) and the ventral jump.
The best was Valery Brumel. Brumel was Soviet. He could go up to 2.28 m. That was the world record at the time.
Fosbury saw limits to that technique. He considered that with the ventral jump man had already reached the Moon. He also saw himself limited.
Stubborn to reset his sports career, Fosbury took notes, tried things. He was blessed with a radical change, a change in safety rules.
The first mattresses appeared.
Until then, jumpers would rise on the bar and land on a mound of sand. Landing on your back seemed reckless.
The mattress showed the light to Fosbury, and Fosbury’s stubbornness showed the light to his coach and the other jumpers.
Mexico’68 was groundbreaking. Those Games consecrated athletics as the Olympic sport par excellence.
Kip Keino taught Kenyan midfielders how to win.
Bob Beamon, Tommie Smith and John Carlos continue to travel the world recovering those passages.
Now elderly, some using a walker, the rest leaning on a cane, all of them had had the opportunity to show themselves to the world the previous summer during the World Athletics Championships in Eugene (Oregon).
We reporters walked behind him, taking notes.
Mexico’68 left a good mark, a very deep mark, on the Olympic imagination.
When Fosbury first rose, 80,000 spectators were stunned.
What was that guy doing?
The experts already sensed something.
Luis María Garriga, the best Spanish jumper of the time (the first Spaniard to exceed 2 meters; he also competed in Mexico’68), had already heard of this American who was experimenting with a new technique.
-The first time I saw him do it was in a moviola of the Spanish Athletics Federation. It seemed like an extravagance – he told Efe in 2018.
-His was an incredible change. Not only did it lead to jumping in a different way, but also that another type of jumper was needed, physically and morphologically speaking. The jumpers had always been high, but from there it went from needing explosive strength to also needing reactive strength. And it also changed the typology of the ideal athlete – said Ramón Torralbo, former coach of Ruth Beitia, to Juan Bautista Martínez for La Vanguardia in 2018.
(It was half a century since the fabulous disruption).
Unlike the experts, who sensed something, the laymen had not seen anything like it.
With Brumel absent in Mexico’68 (three years earlier the Soviet had come close to losing his right foot after a motorcycle accident; 29 surgeries had saved him; he would never jump again), Fosbury gave course to the his creativity Projecting backstroke, he cleared 2.14m, 2.18m, 2.20m and 2.22m, and when he soared to 2.24m in the third he knocked over Caruthers and Gavrilov and also broke the Olympic record.
And with each jump, the audience gave him a standing ovation, as confused as it was excited.
Fosbury would not be the first to break the world record with the Fosbury flop, but Dwight Stones, five years later (2.30 m), at the beginning of an era that has brought us to Javier Sotomayor, the tallest of all time, with his 2.45m in 1993.
(Perhaps his son surpasses him: at only 15 years old, Javier Sotomayor has already jumped 1.99 m; he is the Spanish under 18 indoor champion).
