The Fosbury Flop: How One Athlete Changed the High Jump Forever
Watch any high jump competition today, from a school sports day to the Olympics, and the technique looks identical: the jumper approaches on a curve, turns their back to the bar, and arches over it head and shoulders first. That technique has a name — the Fosbury Flop — and a specific origin: Dick Fosbury, at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
Before the Flop
Through most of the twentieth century, the dominant high jump techniques were the straddle (jumping face-down over the bar, popularised through the 1950s and 1960s) and, earlier still, the Western roll and the scissors technique. All of them shared one thing: the jumper cleared the bar facing it, in some rolling or straddling position, rather than turning their back to it.
An Unconventional Technique, Developed Alone
Fosbury, a civil engineering student at Oregon State University, developed his backwards technique gradually through his teenage years and college career, reportedly starting from a scissors-style jump and adapting it as he tried to clear greater heights, rather than being taught the approach by a coach. It looked unusual enough that commentators and rival coaches were openly skeptical it could work at the highest level — until it won Olympic gold.
Mexico City, 1968
At the 1968 Olympics, Fosbury cleared 2.24 metres using his backwards technique to win gold and set a new Olympic record. The win was widely covered specifically because the technique looked so different from anything else in the competition — a genuinely new way of solving a problem that had been approached the same way for decades.
Why It Won, and Why It Spread
The technical advantage of the Flop is about the athlete’s centre of mass: because the jumper arches backwards over the bar, their centre of mass can pass slightly below the bar itself even as their body clears it, which is not possible with a straddle or scissors technique. Within about a decade of Fosbury’s win, the Flop had become the standard technique among elite high jumpers worldwide, and it remains essentially universal at every level of the sport today.
The Larger Lesson for Any Sport
The Flop is a genuinely useful case study in how slow technical orthodoxy can be to change, even when a better solution exists — and how quickly it can flip once someone demonstrates it working under real competitive pressure, not just in theory. It is a pattern worth recognising in any sport: the accepted technique is not always the best one, only the one that has not yet been credibly beaten.