Dick Fosbury won the high jump at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City by going over the bar backwards. He cleared 2.24m, an Olympic record, and beat his team-mate Ed Carruthers by 2cm.

A painted illustration of a high jumper arching backwards over the bar, head first, against a blue background.
Image: Respublika Narodnaya more
A painting of a man doing Fosbury flop .Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

World Athletics says almost every elite jumper now uses the flop. It says older methods, such as the western roll and the straddle, are no longer in use.

How did a teenager invent it?

Not by design, according to Fosbury himself. He told The Independent in 2008 that the idea came from instinct and not from physics or analysis. It first appeared in May 1963, at a high-school meeting in Grants Pass, Oregon, when he was 16.

The Guardian describes a slow drift. Fosbury tinkered with the traditional style at school and turned more and more sideways, until he jumped with his back to the bar. A local paper then captioned a photo “Fosbury Flops Over Bar”, and the jump had its name.

Coaches doubted it. Fosbury recalled opposing coaches checking the rule book to see whether it was legal, and it was. At Oregon State University his own coach tried to move him back to the western roll. Then Fosbury broke the school record in 1967 with a leap of 2.08m, and the talk of rolls stopped.

Why it needed a softer landing

Fosbury was not alone. The Guardian names the Canadian Debbie Brill, who won Commonwealth Games gold in 1970 with what she called the “Brill bend”.

The obituary also credits a change in the landing. Jumpers had landed in pits of sand or sawdust, and foam rubber mats began to replace them during the 1960s. Charlie Dumas, the first man to clear 7ft, said in a 1986 interview that he lacked the range of motion for the flop. He added that floppers could not have landed in sawdust without risking their necks.

How fast the sport switched

Olympic officials worried the flop would fail at Mexico City’s altitude, so they held a second trial above sea level. Fosbury scraped in as the third qualifier. Winning gave the technique a world audience, and fellow jumpers saw film of it for the first time. Before that, most had seen only photos.

By the 1972 Games in Munich, 28 of the 40 jumpers were flopping. In 1973, Dwight Stones became the first world record-holder to use it, at 2.30m.

Fosbury himself never broke the world record, and he missed the 1972 US team. The current men’s record is 2.45m. Javier Sotomayor of Cuba set it in 1993, and he used the flop.