Former American athlete Dick Fosbury, Olympic champion in 1968, who revolutionized the high jump with a technique that made school and now bears his name, died Sunday at 76 years old.
“It is with a heavy heart that I must announce that longtime friend and client Dick Fosbury passed away peacefully in his sleep after a brief recurrence of lymphoma,” his agent, Ray Schulte, wrote on Instagram on Monday. “The track and field legend is survived by his wife, Robin Tomasi, his son, Erich Fosbury, and his stepdaughters Stephanie Thomas-Phipps of Hailey, Idaho and Kristin Thompson. The family is planning a “celebration of life” which will take place in the coming months,” he added.
Fosbury made track and field history with his famous flop. A dorsal roll jump technique, when all the other athletes used those of the belly roll or the scissor.
It was in 1968 that the world discovered this strange bird hovering in the sky of Mexico City, where the Games were taking place. His jump to 2.24 m, an Olympic record as a bonus, brought him gold and the posterity of a discipline of which he will forever remain the great revolutionary. Because if a few years earlier, coaches and observers predicted a broken neck rather than sustaining a medal, his legacy remains palpable more than 50 years later.
To say that before showing inventiveness and perseverance, Fosbury, born March 6, 1947 in Portland, Oregon, described himself, in his autobiography Wizard of Foz (The Wizard of Foz), as “one of the worst high jumpers in the state”…
“Poetic, alliterative, conflictual”
His perseverance, he first draws it from the fun of these upside down jumps performed in his corner. These are especially rare moments of escape for the teenager, who two years earlier lost his little brother mowed down by a truck, while they were riding their bikes. A tragedy that led to the divorce of his parents a few months later.
So Fosbury turns his back on the bar as one turns his back on grief. And too bad if the fall sometimes hurts on the sand, at a time when rubber foam is not yet used to receive the bodies.
Tired of capping at 1.62 m with traditional jumping techniques, the young man finally tried his back roll in 1963 at the Grant’s Pass sports meeting in Oregon, where he cleared 1.70 m, 1.76 m and 1. .82 m trusting his instincts. “When the bar reached a height I had never reached before, I knew I had to do something different. I started to change the position of my body: as the bar went up, I went from a seated position to another more lying on my back. I improved my record and finished fourth in the competition. It was the click, “he explained in 2018.
First making sure his technique didn’t break any rules, he perfected it and began to make a name for himself the day the Medford Mail-Tribune publishes, in 1964, a photo captioned “ Fosbury Flops Over Bar (“Fosbury backwards over the bar”).
The Fosbury Jump — “ Fosbury Flop in English — was born. “It’s poetic. It is alliterative. It’s conflicting”, then sums up, with a touch of self-mockery, the one that journalists describe as “the laziest high jumper in the world”.
Olympic record
Four years later, after narrowly escaping the Vietnam War, he took part in the final of the high jump competition at the Mexico Games on October 20. Almost unknown – and therefore everything, except favorite – he nevertheless won the gold medal, an Olympic record as a bonus.
“Once I was in the air, I could feel the space between my body and the bar. I knew I had passed the highest bar of my life. The whole stadium erupted, it was a great moment. I will never forget it”, testifies then the one who suddenly becomes a celebrity and comes, without really realizing it, to put his sport upside down.
In 1968, the “revolution” is everywhere, in the guitars of the Beatles, under the cobblestones of France and on the heights of athletics. The Fosbury jump was quickly emulated: at the 1972 Olympics, which for the last time crowned a strider, the Soviet Juri Tarmak, 28 of the 40 participants made it their technique.
“I adapted an outdated style and modernized it to make it effective. I did not know that anyone else in the world could use it and I would never have imagined that it would revolutionize the discipline”, confided the one who failed to qualify for the Munich Games after having to put in parentheses his sports career for his studies in civil engineering.