There are athletes who are not distinguished by their palmares or their records, but by something else, its impact on sports history.
The list is short, very short.
And perhaps the first name that comes to mind is Dick Fosburydied this Sunday of lymphatic cancer at the age of 76, according to what his agent said on Monday.
Fosbury forever changed the history of the high jump by inventing a style, the ‘Fosbury Flop’, the jump with his back to the bar, which he taught the world on October 20, 1969 in the best possible setting, in the final of the Games Olympics of Mexicothose of the wonders of Jim Hines, Wyomia Tyus and Lee Evans, those of the raised fist of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, those of Bob Beamon’s gliding, those of the 22 world records.
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And among them was not that of Fosbury, who never in his career managed to exceed the 2.28 meters that the Soviet Valeri Brummel had established in 1963, still with a ventral roller, facing the bar head-on. With that old style, the American Pat Matzdorf added another centimeter to the record in 1971, but Fosbury’s style was already the discovery to follow, and remains to this day. At the 72 Munich Games, for which it no longer qualified, 28 of the 40 participants used it. A decade later, its use was unquestionable.
Fosbury, 21, was a skinny and tall guy, 1.92m tall, the physiognomy that would later prevail in the test. He was also a bit of a loner. Instead of going to the opening ceremony, he took a caravan and went to see the sunset far from the Mexican capital.
When the competition came, he was not counted among the favorites. There was talk of the Soviet Valentin Gavrilov [bronce, 2,20m] or the American Ed Caruthers [plata, 2,22m]who had beaten Fosbury in the internal selective, where he had already shown his technique, received with surprise, but there he was surpassing heights one after another until he successfully passed 2.24m, the Olympic record and what would be his best mark ever.
He also took advantage of the first Games in which the sand pit was replaced by a mat for the fall, since otherwise he would have injured his head.
“In the concentration routine prior to the jumps, he made some very strange sounds, while he waved back and forth, in full trance. The spectators came from the other areas of the stadium to enjoy that eccentric who was not a joke. ‘Come on, gringo!’, they yelled at him with each attempt,” he recalled a few years ago, in The countryLuis Garriga, the Spaniard who finished 11th in that final and later became mayor of Borja, in Zaragoza.
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Fosbury, who was born in Portland, Oregon, the birthplace of great athletics, in 1947, he invented his style as a weapon with which to defend himself in a test that he was not good at, and he did it against everything and everyone. He began developing it at the age of 16, when he was a junior at North Medford High School and already showing great ability in science, well before graduating with a degree in Civil Engineering. He calculated that the center of gravity of the body would be below the bar and would require less power in the jump..
In high school, in his first tests, everyone laughed at him, they considered him an eccentric, a guy who wanted to attract attention.. Not even his coach, Berny Wagner, saw it clearly, and only when he reached 2.08m, already in university, did he encourage him to continue forward with the backstroke. “The popularity that my style has acquired is a wonderful prize because at first I had to put up with no one liking it,” Fosbury recalled over the years, in his biography ‘The Wizard of Foz’, by Bob Welch, published 50 years after his feat.
“I have always associated what I experienced that afternoon in the Olympic stadium in Mexico with a comment that, years later and referring to other issues, I heard from the publicist Lluis Bassats: ‘Can you imagine a product that is not only innovative, but that kills the competition in one fell swoop?’. That product has been around and I saw it in front of me for over three hours. His name was Dick Fosbury“, sums up Garriga.
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