At the wonderful University of Oregon, Berny Wagner reviewed the videos of his pupil, Dick Fosbury, and told him:
– I don’t know, Dick…
And Fosbury tried again.
He would take a few steps back, take a run, run crosswise, push himself and project himself backwards in the air. Back arched, he attacked the bar. And on his back, he fell on the mat.
Nobody else did that.
Nobody else in the world.
– I don’t know, Dick.
Fosbury was insistent and stubborn, trying and trying, gaining inches with every attempt, and encouraged by all this progress, Berny Wagner had ended up agreeing.
(Well, after all, Oregon track and field is creative and daring, and that’s where the legendary Steve Prefontaine comes from.)
“Come on, let’s try it,” Wagner ended up saying.
And with that disruptive style, the Fosbury Flop, Dick Fosbury was going to appear at the Mexico’68 Games, those of Bob Beamon and Tommie Smith and John Carlos –what those Games!–, to rise up to 2.24m, break the Olympic record and universally institute the style, goodbye to the scissor style and the ventral roller.
Dick Fosbury died this Sunday, a victim of lymphoma.
He was 76 years old.
(…)
It was not like this in the past.
Before Fosbury, the scissors style was applied (the least, that technique was already being overcome) and the ventral roller.
The best was Valery Brumel. Brumel was Soviet. He could go up to 2.28m. That was the world record of the time.
Fosbury saw limits to that technique. He considered that, with the ventral roller, man had already reached the Moon. He too was limited to himself.
Determined to reset his sports career, Fosbury took notes, tried things. He blessed her with a radical change, a change in safety regulations.
The first mats appeared.
Until then, jumpers would rise above the bar and land on a mound of sand. Landing on your back seemed foolhardy.
The mat showed the light to Fosbury, and Fosbury’s stubbornness showed the light to his coach and the rest of the jumpers.
Mexico’68 was groundbreaking. Those Games consecrated athletics as the Olympic sport par excellence.
Kip Keino taught Kenyan middle distance runners how to win.
Bob Beamon, Tommie Smith and John Carlos continue touring the world, recovering those passages.
Elderly, some using the walker, the rest leaning on the cane, all of them had had the opportunity to show themselves to the world last summer, during the World Athletics Championships in Eugene (Oregon).
The pens were after them, we were taking notes.
Mexico’68 left a good mark, a very deep mark, in the Olympic imagination.
When Fosbury first rose, 80,000 viewers were stumped.
What was that guy doing?
The experts intuited something.
Luis María Garriga, the best Spanish jumper of the time (the first Spaniard to exceed two meters; he also competed in Mexico ’68), had already heard about that American who was experimenting with a new technique.
–The first time I saw him do it was on a moviola of the Spanish Athletics Federation. It seemed extravagant to me,” he told Efe in 2018.
His was a tremendous change. It not only caused him to jump in a different way, but also required a different type of jumper, physically and morphologically speaking. Jumpers have always been tall, but from there they went from needing explosive strength to also requiring reactive strength. And the typology of the ideal athlete also changed,” said Ramón Torralbo, former coach of Ruth Beitia, to Juan Bautista Martínez in 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 almost lost his right foot after a motorcycle accident; 29 surgeries had saved him; he would never jump again), Fosbury gave free rein to his creativity. Throwing himself backwards, he cleared 7′, 7′, 7′, 7′, and 7’2′, and rising to 7′, on the third, knocked out Caruthers and Gavrilov and also knocked over the Olympic record.
And at each jump, the audience cheered for him, as confused as they were excited.
Fosbury would not be the first to break the world record with the Fosbury Flop, but Dwight Stones, five years later (2.30m), the beginning of an era that has led us to Javier Sotomayor, the tallest of all time, with his 2.45m from 1993.
(Perhaps his son will surpass him: at only 15 years old, Jaxier Sotomayor has already jumped 1.99m; he is the Spanish under-18 indoor champion).
