Dick Fosbury, a lanky civil engineering student who shocked his classmates, wowed sports fans and started a revolution in competitive high jumping with his backward jumps, died Sunday. He was 76.
The cause was a lymphoma, as a spokesman said on Instagram. He did not say where Fosbury died.
Fosbury’s claim to fame was a signature jumping style: the “Fosbury Flop”. Running on a raised pole, he threw himself back first, appearing to hover parallel to the ground for a moment, landing roughly on his neck.
The technique has been likened to a corpse being thrown out of a window. Like Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling, Fosbury’s flop struck many viewers as somewhere between a physical feat and a joke. At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the crowd cheered, jeered and laughed as Fosbury competed.
But the last laugh was his:
The high jump bar kept coming up and Fosbury kept clearing it. Eventually, he hit a Fosbury flop of 7ft 4¼” – which not only earned him the gold medal, but an Olympic record at the time.
“Even the fearless Fosbury is amazed,” reported the New York Times after his win. “Sometimes I watch movies,” he says, “and I really wonder how I do it.”
Within a few years, the Fosbury Flop was the standard method of elite high jumping. (The current Olympic record is held by Charles Austin, who flopped Fosbury 7ft 10in at the 1996 Atlanta games.)
More broadly, the flop set a standard for the kind of innovation that can transform a human endeavor. The Times has written about “the Dick Fosbury of ski jumping, race walking, golf, angle fishing and the game show Jeopardy!” When Piaget introduced a line of watches advertised as a “daring move,” the company made Fosbury its spokesman.
Richard Douglas Fosbury was born on March 6, 1947 in Portland, Oregon. His father drove a logging truck and his mother was a teacher. He grew up in Medford, southern Oregon.
In later years, he often said that early in his high jump career in high school, he was the worst jumper in his school, in the school board, and in all of Oregon. He wasn’t even a gifted athlete, apparently, having failed to make his school’s football and basketball teams.
In the high jump, he first used the old-fashioned scissors style, in which the athlete starts at the bar and dashes over in a roughly seated position, crossing the bar one leg at a time.
One day, Fosbury felt inclined to experiment with a new method: trying to clear the bars with his hips. The flop started coming to him naturally. The coaches weren’t so sure: they checked the rulebooks to make sure it was legal, warned him he could hurt himself doing it, or simply claimed it wasn’t a winning strategy.
Fosbury ignored the advice. In high school alone, he improved his personal best by a full foot. He started training harder and found a new love for the sport.
“When you’re elite in the high jump and you’re going over the bar at those high levels, you really feel like you’re flying,” he told The Times in 2002. “You’re only up there for a second, but time is really starting to slow down. Time expands. The mind does amazing things. And at that level it’s really 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical.”
It wasn’t just his form that made Fosbury an unconventional athlete. He was wearing unsuitable running shoes. He had the arm muscles of a chess player. Before approaching, he rocked back and forth, clenching and unclenching his fists.
In 1972 he graduated from Oregon State University with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. He moved to Idaho, where he started an engineering firm. His responsibilities included designing and building bike lanes and jogging paths. He eventually became Blaine County, Idaho’s zoning commissioner.
He also remained involved in sports, serving as vice president of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Association and teaching high jump around the world.
He took swing dance lessons from a woman named Robin Tomasi. She became his wife, and they raised hay and tended horses on a farm near the southern Idaho town of Bellevue.
Fosbury’s survivors include his wife; his son Eric; his stepdaughters Stephanie Thomas-Phipps and Kristin Thompson; and several grandchildren.
Even after his Olympic win, it seemed possible that the Fosbury flop was a novelty and other techniques like the straddle might prove superior in the end.
“I think some kids will try my way now,” Fosbury told The Times in 1968. “I do not guarantee results and do not recommend my style to anyone. All I’m saying is, if a kid can’t straddle, they can try my way.”
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