Goodbye to Dick Fosbury, brilliant inventor of the back high jump

Inventing a technique to conquer the world, from the Royal Engineers’ ball passes to Tazio Nuvolari’s dérapage curve, from Bobby Jones’ mashie to Bjorn Borg’s two-handed backhand. There are many athletes who have gained a competitive advantage from a new way of interpreting a sport. A small variation, sometimes bordering on the regulation and always in the name of think different. A decisive gesture, sometimes imperceptible, more often revolutionary, of course none as ingenious as the technique imagined and put into practice by Dick Fosbury.

The inventor of the high back jump, who died at the age of 76, was truly an outsider, a sort of Glenn Gould of sport. Never ever could he have won anything, too frail to compete and too shy to impose himself. Above all, that was the era of the great Soviet champions, first of all Valerij Brumel who had dominated the scene in the 60s, bringing the world record to 2.28. Devastating power and steel knees, he has been jumping with the ventral since the days of Olympia.

Then one fine day Dick Fosbury came along. He was certainly not a Martian and not even a Jamaican bobsledder, he came from Oregon and had a more frail physique than his colleagues John Hartfield and Reynaldo Brown who in fact blocked his way from college days. Fosbury did not give up. While the others trained explosive strength, he invented the back technique. “It felt so natural and like all good ideas and then you wonder why no one had thought of it before.” In fact, the landing was to break his neck, when Fosbury cracked two vertebrae in a race, the authorities decided to increase the thickness of the mattresses. Fosbury perfected his technique for five years, almost in solitude, pursuing the dream of the perfect parable. With his back well arched he would have passed the bar even with the center of gravity of the body lower than it. The egg of Columbus with which Fosbury tried everything.

The testing ground was the Mexico City Olympics, the only ones he ever attended. In an endless race that lasted more than four hours, a battle of nerves against Ed Caruthers and Valentin Gavrilov, on the third jump Dick Fosbury reached 2.24. He had climbed higher than everyone and against all odds he prevailed. It was the most memorable feat of México 68, together with the raised fist of John Carlos and Tommie Smith and the endless jump of Bob Beamon, second only to the logo designed by Lance Wyman, a truly unrivaled stroke of genius.

With that jump Fosbury took the gold medal and it was his first and last success. “It was very tiring, it changed my life, they put me on a pedestal but it wasn’t where I wanted to be.” His success was decreed by history. The Fosbury Flop it became an increasingly popular technique and a common expression. Example of how, by changing the rules of the game, new goals can be achieved. Those on which a group of young architects works who, not surprisingly, chose to call themselves Fosbury Architecture. They will represent Italy at the next Architecture Biennale and it will be a pavilion to discover the most interesting construction sites on the peninsula. Only concrete projects, because a gimmick is not enough to reach the top, because each discipline is a matter of inventiveness and continuity.

The Fosbury style also needed perseverance, it took years for it to become the more widespread technique, less risk to the knees and a greater push up. Within ten years almost everyone was jumping on their backs except for a few performers anchored in the past such as Volodymyr Yashchenko, Ukrainian from Zaporizhzhia who on 12 March 1978 in Milan, exactly 45 years before Fosbury’s disappearance, brought the record to 2.35 which is still the highest value ever among ventrals. Nine centimeters less than Javier Sotomayor’s 2.46 in Salamanca in 1993, the inimitable leap of the Principe de las Alturas whose record has held on for thirty years. Unique example of longevity in one of the most primordial disciplines ever invented, where technique matters more than power and thought matters more than action. Imagining a jump and knowing how to make it, in search of the perfect parabola, an impossible dream of many great athletes of the past and a splendid epiphany of that great genius Dick Fosbury.