Former American Dick Fosbury, the man who won the gold medal in Mexico 1968 and revolutionized high jump with a technique he invented and now carries his name, the Fosbury flop, passed away on Sunday at 76 years old.
“It is with a heavy heart that I have announced that my longtime friend and client Dick Fosbury passed away peacefully in his sleep early on Sunday after a brief battle with lymphoma,” his agent Ray Schulte wrote on Instagram.
Olympic athlete Disck Fosbury greets fans while carrying the tourch of the Commonweath Games in 2016
Richard Douglas Fosbury, born in Portland on March 6th, 1947, was skilled in several sports teams, but he sided with track and field in high school. He wasn’t the best at high jump with the style that was used at the time, but his coach was the one who motivated him to improvise. In 1963, he started working on a new jumping technique that would become known as the ‘Fosbury Flop.’
The move consisted of running towards the bar on a curved trajectory to approach it diagonally and attacking the bar back-first, and then pushing his head above the bar, arching the back, and flexing the legs until the last second. This style helped him win the 1968 NCAA indoor championships and also won the trials to join Team USA for the Mexico 1968 Olympics.
At the Olympics, he became one of the most notable athletes by beating heavy favorites like Gavrilov and Carruthers and setting a new Olympic record at 2.24 meters, which he held until Montreal 1976, and he won the gold medal after clearing the bar in his third attempt.
After becoming an Olympic champion in Mexico, Fosbury kept competing for a few more years, but he retired at 25 years old after failing to qualify for the Olympic Games in Munich to defend his gold. He continued studying at university to become a civil engineer.
Although he could never break Valeri Brúmel’s world record at 2.28 meters from 1963, the effectiveness of his new technique earned him the appreciation and respect of every high jump coach of decades to come, and the new generations of athletes have adopted this style to the point it has become the standard. In fact, nowadays, almost nobody uses another technique that isn’t the 'Fosbury Flop.'