Dick Fosbury, the leaper who revamped the technical discipline of high jump and won an Olympic gold medal with his 'Fosbury Flop,' has died. He was 76.
Fosbury died Sunday after a recurrence with lymphoma.
Before Fosbury, many high jumpers cleared their heights by running parallel to the bar, then using a straddle kick to leap over, facing down. However, in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Fosbury took off at an angle, leaped backward, bent himself into a 'J' shape to catapult his 1.93-meter frame over the bar, then crashed headfirst into the landing pit.
It was a convention-defying move as he cleared 2.24 meters to win the gold and set a record.
By the next Olympics, 28 of the 40 jumpers were using Fosbury's technique.
"Dick Fosbury was a true legend! He changed an entire event forever with a technique that looked crazy at the time but the result made it the standard," sprint great Michael Johnson tweeted.
Over time, Fosbury's move became more than simply high jumping. Business leaders and professors used it as a study in innovation and willingness to take chances and break the mold.
"It's literally genius," said 2012 Olympic high jump champion Erik Kynard Jr. "And it takes huge courage, obviously... due to the equipment then."
Fosbury started tinkering with a new technique in the early '60s, as a teenager at Medford High School in Oregon.
"I knew I had to change my body position, and that's what started first the revolution, and over the next two years, the evolution," Fosbury said in a 2014 interview.
The term Fosbury Flop is credited to the Medford Mail-Tribune, which wrote the headline "Fosbury Flops Over the Bar" after a high school meet. Fosbury liked the term.
"It's poetic. It's alliterative. It's a conflict," he once said.
As a kid, Fosbury threw himself into sports as a way of dealing with grief after his younger brother, Greg, was killed by a drunken driver while the two boys were riding bikes. Unable to stick with the football or basketball teams, Fosbury tried track but struggled with the straddle jump.
He looked at the thing differently, said Eric Hintz of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. "He had the guts and fortitude to stick with it in the face of criticism."
Fosbury's biographer, Bob Welch, wrote that the athlete was fine dealing with people ridiculing his style because, to him, it still was not as painful as the sorrow he felt for the loss of his brother.
Decades later, Fosbury's Flop remains a hit, and his willingness to take a chance remains a lesson from which anyone can learn.
The Fosbury Flop, pioneered by Dick Fosbury, defied convention. AP
Dick Fosbury continued his involvement in sports until his death. AP
