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With only days left till the XXX Olympic Games in London, we continue our list of the most inspirational Olympic stories of all time.
Child prodigies winning medals and making history is great, but not extraordinary. People who are considered as flops, people who were not given a chance doing the same things is something different. Something worthy of an inspirational story.
# 8 – Dick Fosbury’s from being a Flop to ‘the’ Flop
1968: Dick Fosbury of the USA clears the bar in the high jump competiton with his dramtic new jumping style.
Dick Fosbury tried his hand at everything. From Soccer to Basketball, he played almost every sport, but was never good at anything. He was just an average athlete before he invented a technique that made him a champion, and en-route changed the dynamics of a sport forever.
Before the 1960s, there were two ways to clear a high jump bar. The first is known as the scissors jump, where a athlete takes his first leg over the bar and then his second before landing. The second method is known as the western roll or straddle, where the athlete rolls over the bar with his face down. As time progressed, the scissors kick was not used by many people as the straddle produced better results.
Fosbury said that his coach taught him both the methods, but he found it very hard to master the straddle. Dick Fosbury tried the straddle and his best effort read 5ft 4in which was around 60 cm short of the world record. So, to put it delicately, Dick Fosbury had no hopes of winning a medal in High Jumping. Fosbury didn’t budge. He tried something different, something totally new.
How Fosbury did his Flop
Fosbury lifted his hips, arched backwards with his shoulders going down and landed on his back. He cleared 5ft 6in. He clearly had no idea what his body was doing. He tried it again, this time he cleared 5ft 8in. Everyone gathered around Fosbury. The Coaches were amused, on his fourth attempt, he cleared 5ft 10in. In just a single afternoon, Dick Fosbury improved his personal best by half a foot! Everyone was talking about it, the Coaches were wondering “Is this safe, Is this even legal?”
That was how the Fosbury Flop was born. Fosbury commented “I guess it did look kind of weird at first,” he said, “but it felt so natural that, like all good ideas, you just wonder why no one had thought of it before me.”
Talking about it, Fosbury said “Intuitively I liked the contradiction: a flop that could be a success,” he told me. “It was descriptive, it was alliterative, and it fit.” But still nobody took him seriously. “Everybody just thought, ‘It’s pretty funny and everything, but he’ll never do anything,’” he recalled.
As Fosbury said, everyone liked the Flop but no one took it seriously. Even Fosbury coach Berny Wagner didn’t take the Flop seriously. But, when Fosbury cleared 6ft 6in in front of Wagner’s eyes, he knew that Fosbury was going to be a champion.
The media trained their eyes on Fosbury. At that time, nobody knew how to describe his technique. LA Times commented “he goes over the bar like a guy being pushed out of a 30-storey window”
Fosbury cleared the American trails and went to the 1968 Mexican games as a high jumper, who has never jumped outside his own country. The finals of the high jump event lasted more than four hours.
The first bar was set at 6ft 6in and the first person was eliminated only after 41 jumps. After rigorous and time consuming rounds, only three Athletes were left. Fosbury along with fellow countryman Ed Caruthers and USSR’s Valentin Gavrilov. The bar was set at 7ft 3.25in, Fosbury cleared on his first attempt while Caruthers cleared on his second. Gavrilov missed and settled for bronze.
The bar wad raised to 7ft 4.25in if cleared, an new Olympic record and higher than what Fosbury and Caruthers have ever jumped. Both Fosbury and Caruthers missed in their first two attempts. Fosbury satisfied with his preparation began his run up and cleared the bar in usual fashion. The 80,000 fans in the stadium knew the jump was good. Caruthers missed his jump, Fosbury hit gold.
A few weeks after the event, Fosbury was still a superstar. “I had a horrible time dealing with all the attention, really,” he said in an interview. “It was too much. I was a small-town kid who did something way beyond what I had ever expected to do. I like the attention, but I wanted it to be over at a point. It didn’t work that way.”
He didn’t qualify for the Munich Games but his legacy still lives on. In Munich, 13 among the 16 High Jump Finalists used the Flop. Right from then till 2000, 32 out of the 34 Medalists in High Jumping have used the flop.
When you take a look at the 1968 Video of Fosbury winning the High Jump event, to our eyes it is the other jumpers who look weird. That is how much Fosbury’s Flop has changed the sport.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX3bCh8v1FE
All Athletes have the desire to do better, to exceed their limits and to explore boundaries. What Dick Fosbury did was probably the most rarest form of innovation – True and Elemental.
Here is a list of other entires that made it to our list
# 1 – Derek Redmond and the Spirit of Olympics
# 4 – Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10
# 5 – Lawrence Lemieux’s sacrifice
# 7 – Wilma Rudolph’s triumph over adversities
