Faster Higher Smarter: Bright Ideas That Transformed Sports

Faster Higher Smarter: Bright Ideas That Transformed Sports — page 7 — 5 feet To clear a 5-foot bar with a SCISSOR JUMP you have to lift your center of mass quite a lot higher than the bar maybe 5 feet 6 inches For a successful STRADDLE JUMP your center of mass only needs to be a little higher than the bar maybe 5 feet 3 inches Using the FOSBURY FLOP the neatest jumping style of the three your center of gravity can actually be lower than the bar maybe 4 feet 10 inches IF NOT DICK THEN DEBBIE During the same years that Fosbury was developing his technique Canadian high jumper Debbie Brill had independently started using the same technique At the age of 16 using her Brill bend jumping style Debbie became the first North American woman to clear 6 feet Debbie Brill at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles Search for 1968 Olympics high jump to find videos of Dick Fosbury’s jumps 10

Faster Higher Smarter: Bright Ideas That Transformed Sports — page 8 — INVENTING THE FLOP How did Fosbury come up with this great idea By accident Like many athletes Fosbury had a hard time with the straddle technique To do it properly an athlete’s timing and coor dination need to be perfect and Fosbury’s weren’t In high school he could only clear 5 feet 4 inches and was struggling in compe titions Desperate for a way to improve his performance he asked his coach if he could try the scissor jump in the next competition And that’s when everything changed Using the scissors I make 5-4 Fosbury explained later And I am sitting there looking at the bar at 5-6 trying to figure out Now how can I jump higher I know I have to lift my butt up because that is usually where you knock the bar off So as I try to lift my hips up my shoulders go back a little bit and I clear 5-6 It was kind of a lazy scissors At 5-8 I lift my hips a little higher and my shoulders go back a little further and I make it At 5-10 same thing By this time I am going over the bar flat on my back I’m upside down from everyone else into kind of a back layout I go out at 6 feet and nobody knows what the heck I’m doing Fosbury kept using the flop and in his senior year he placed second in the state high-school championship But his college coach wasn’t a fan of the new technique and kept pushing Fosbury to learn the straddle Finally when Fosbury could only manage 6 feet 4 inches using the straddle but broke a school record of 6 feet 10 inches using the flop his coach said We’re going to develop this thing By 1968 Fosbury had done just that and nobody ever suggested he try the straddle jump again IT’S THE PITS Prior to the 1960s the landing pits for high jump were filled with sand or wood chips Landing on your shoulders from a height of 7 feet would have been very painful and dangerous It was only during the 1960s that people started using foam rubber pads several feet high in the landing area So the Fosbury flop wouldn’t have been practical or safe until around the time Dick Fosbury invented it 11

JavaScript Required

Whoops! We're sorry but Epic doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Check your web browser's settings to make sure it's enabled.