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At the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico city A 21 year old American named Dick Fosbury shocked the judge and 80,000 spectators at a session of track and field, by winning a gold medal and setting a new Olympic record with a new jumping technique. This technique revolutionized the high jump and is now widely known as the Fosbury flop.

Until that time jumpers generally went over the bar either one leg at a time with a sort of scissors technique, similar to how you might jump over a hurdle, or using the straddle techniques facing down and rolling over the bar. Fosbury’s revolution was to run at the bar and essentially jump sideways starting with the outside and turning the body so that the head goes over the bar first. At first appearance,  the Fosbury flop looked completely ridiculous. This only made it easier for competitors, journalists and spectators to stick to their familiar approaches, dismissing Fosbury’s method as silly and ignoring his innovation.

How did Fosbury fundamentally change the high jump box? He simply wasn’t good enough to do it any other way and so he forced himself to experiment to move away from the conventional wisdom. The only other option would have been to quit the sport. In his own words, I felt I had to do something different. To clear the bar I tried lifting my hips, which caused my shoulders to go back and I succeeded.  I made a new height. I tried again and successively I was able to clear 6 inches higher than any of my previous bests and that change made me competitive. It kept me in the game and I converted from sitting on the bar to laying flat on my back.

At the top levels of any sport improvements are generally measured in fractions of second or inches and so any new approach that enabled an improvement of half a foot clearly deserved serious attention. In the United States, Fosbury honed his approach.  ‘I guess it did look kind of a weird at first’, he said, ‘but it feels so natural that like all good ideas you just wonder why no one had thought of it before me.’

A journalist from the Guardian covering the Olympic trials where Fosbury barely qualified was not convinced he had the potential and called him “The curiosity of the team.”  Eventually in Mexico, the crowd began to notice the unusual technique with laughter as the last two jumpers and Fosbury kept clearing higher and higher bars without any failure.  Then only 2 jumpers. The crowd was so impressed that they ignored the leading marathoners who entered into the stadium then. He then cleared 2.24 meters, or 7 feet, 4.25 inches for gold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZsH46Ek2ao

Excerpted from ‘Thinking in new boxes’ by Alan Iny and Luc de Brabandere