Well, I'm here to be the annoying guy at the next table who acts as a sort of human QI klaxon and goes WELL ACTUALLY it's not quite as simple as that. Thinking about it, this is a bit like the post I did after the demise of Arnold Palmer, with a similar disclaimer that it's not in any way having a pop at Fosbury, just making a couple of observations about how actual events get massaged into a sort of glorious mythic version which irons out some of the inconvenient messy complexities of actual reality.
A brief tangent: it was actually this tweet which prompted me to actually do a bit of research here:
Sports nerds: are there any other examples like Dick Fosbury: mid-level athletes who reached the pinnacle of their sport, just once, due to a brilliant innovation?
— Ian Leslie (@mrianleslie) March 21, 2023
There are some interesting responses in the comments, including the only other example which occurred to me - the switch in ski-jumping from an in-flight posture with the skis extended in parallel to one where they're in a sort of V-shape, which turns out to be considerably more aerodynamic for reasons I can't begin to fathom. I recall seeing (probably on Ski Sunday) a Finnish jumper called Matti Nykänen doing it in the 1980s and it eventually became the standard, just as the Fosbury flop did (with some caveats, see below).
Anyway, Ian Leslie's tweet was evidently a bit of research in advance of this interesting article about Fosbury. I mean there is a bit of life-coach bollocks in there as well - "seize the adjacent possible", if you please - but even in that exact section there is an interesting point: Fosbury's innovation was only feasible, or safely feasible anyway, because of advances in landing mat technology.
The physics of the Fosbury flop are fascinating and stem from a realisation (Fosbury had a background in engineering) that it wasn't necessary for the whole body to be above the level of the bar at the same time (as, broadly, it was for the variety of previous techniques); indeed in a perfectly executed flop the centre of mass of the athlete passes under the bar. Think of it as exchanging the energy required to lift an entire bucket of water over the bar for the much lower energy required to use a hose to siphon the water over bit by bit. This video shows the progression through the years from the basic scissors (essentially just hurdling the bar; I'm sure you can make up your own jokes about furious scissoring in the women's event) of the early years to some variation of the Western roll in the 1920s and a gradual transition to the full straddle by the 1950s, and then Fosbury and his successors. Note also the equivalent video showing the progression of the ski-jumping world record with the switch to the modest V-shape in the early 1990s and the gradual exaggeration of the posture to the full spatchcock of modern jumpers.
Here's the mildly contrarian HOT TAKE bit: you would think, from watching that video, which shows only floppers post-1968, that Fosbury's innovation prompted an immediate switch, by everyone, to the new technique, with a bit of embarrassed coughing all round at not having thought of it themselves. Not so, actually, as there was quite a lengthy transitional period where straddlers persisted and in fact claimed the men's high jump gold at the very next Olympics, in Munich in 1972 (for which Fosbury failed to qualify) and the women's high jump gold at the one after that, in Montreal in 1976. The men's world record was only claimed by a flopper in 1973 - Fosbury's Olympic-winning (and, to be fair, Olympic record-setting) height of 2.24 metres in 1968 was four centimetres short of the world record at the time. Moreover, the world record was reclaimed by a straddler, Vladimir Yashchenko, in 1977 and only relinquished finally to a flopper in 1980. As I see I said here, the world records for the two styles are still only ten centimetres apart, despite no-one having seriously competed with the straddle since about 1980. It's interesting to speculate how things might have panned out if Yashchenko's career hadn't been ended by a knee injury when he was only 20, and if his illustrious predecessor Valeriy Brumel, who raised the world record six times in about two years in the early 1960s, and was still the world record holder at the time of Fosbury's Olympic triumph, hadn't had his career ended by a motorcycle accident when he was only 25.
Furthermore, it's interesting to note that Fosbury may well not even have been the pioneer of this style; Canadian jumper Debbie Brill was also doing it in the mid-1960s and it's not clear who thought of it first or to what extent the two pioneers knew about each other. This article is the only one I can find which quotes Fosbury referring to Brill, but it's a bit vague.
Lastly, it's also interesting to note the progression of the world records for the main jumping events (high jump, long jump and triple jump) and theorise that human progress in this area has stagnated. These are some of the longest-standing records in athletics:
- Men's high jump: Javier Sotomayor, 1993 (30 years)
- Women's high jump: Stefka Kostadinova, 1987 (36 years)
- Men's long jump: Mike Powell, 1991 (32 years)
- Women's long jump: Galina Chistyakova, 1988 (35 years)
- Men's triple jump: Jonathan Edwards, 1995 (28 years)
- Women's triple jump: there was a 26-year gap between 1995 and 2021 but subsequently the record has been raised twice by Yulimar Rojas. Still, you know, exceptions, rules, etc.
Maybe another similar technical revolution is needed. Or maybe we've just cracked jumping, as a species, and that's it, barring evolving some extra limbs or something.
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