Say that in his autobiography Wizard of Foz (The Wizard of Foz), Dick Fosbury described himself as “one of the worst high jumpers in the state.” Was it this sudden realization that made him look for other ways to leap high, to end up with his famous «Fosbury-flop» ? This technique of dorsal jump that he knew how to put to good use, when all the other athletes resorted to those called the ventral roll or the scissor. A jump that the ex-athlete, who died Monday at the age of 76, leaves to posterity, the gratin of jumpers and jumpers imitating him again and again in the most prestigious events in the discipline today.
“It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that longtime friend and client Dick Fosbury passed away peacefully in his sleep early Sunday morning after a brief recurrence of lymphoma,” wrote on Instagram Ray Schulte. Cancer which he was already diagnosed with once in 2008. “The track and field legend is survived by his wife Robin Tomasi, son Erich Fosbury and daughters-in-law Stephanie Thomas-Phipps of Hailey, Idaho, and Kristin Thompson. The family plans a “celebration of life” which will take place in the coming months,” specifies the same Ray Schulte.
hero in spite of himself
Born in Portland, Oregon on March 6, 1947, Fosbury made athletic history with a bang in 1968, when the world discovered this odd bird soaring in the skies of Mexico City where the Olympic Games were taking place. A final leap to 2.24 meters in front of the “olé” of the public released at each of his passages, brought him gold and the Olympic record, as well as the future of a discipline of which he will forever remain the great revolutionary.
Nothing obvious a few years earlier, when the same teenager Fosbury aroused criticism, doubts and even mockery on his way to Olympus, in an America where coaches and observers predicted a broken neck rather than a medal. Until then, this son of English immigrants, a pupil of Medford in Oregon, was clearly more gifted for science than for this sport which he has been practicing for six years, after having abandoned baseball and basketball. Tired of capping at 1.62 m with traditional jumping techniques, the young man ended up trying his back roll in 1963, at the meeting in Grants Pass (Oregon) where he cleared 1.70 m, 1.76 m and 1. 82 m trusting his instincts.
And too bad if the fall sometimes hurts on the sand, sawdust or wood shavings on the ground, at a time when rubber foam is not yet used to receive the bodies. “When the bar hit a height I had never been before, I knew I had to do something different. I started to change the position of my body: as the bar went up, I went from a seated position to another more lying on my back. I improved my record and finished fourth in the competition. It was the click, he explained in 2018.
First making sure his technique didn’t break any rules, he perfected it and began to make a name for himself the day the Medford Mail Tribune publishes in 1964 a photo captioned «Fosbury Flops Over Bar» (“Fosbury backwards over the bar”). The “Fosbury flop” was born. “It’s poetic. It is alliterative. It’s conflicting.” then summarizes, with a touch of self-mockery, the one that journalists describe as “world’s laziest high jumper”.
Retraining
His legacy remains palpable more than fifty years later. “I had no idea anyone else in the world could use [cette technique] and I would never have imagined that it would revolutionize the discipline”, confided the man who failed to qualify for the 1972 Munich Games, after having had to put his sports career on hold for his studies in civil engineering. Tired of the saltires, he reconverted engineer of the bridges and roadways. Away from stadiums and bars, which suited better this antihero opposed to the Vietnam War (which he escaped due to a dubious spine), and who took his sudden popularity badly.
However, the only athlete to have given his name to a technique is perhaps not its true inventor. More than thirty years after the Mexico Olympics, the specialist athletic magazine Track & Field reveals, photo in support, that on May 24, 1963, Bruce Quande, an illustrious stranger from Montana, had already passed the bar of the double meters flat back. In the same way that Dick Fosbury would have been inspired by another jumper and pioneer of the genre – the Canadian Debbie Brill whose dorsal windings are listed as early as 1965 – to perfect her gestures. And reach heights that he himself had never considered.