When a pole vaulter starts his attempt, he has the bar as an opponent and the pole as an ally. No matter how well trained he is, his success depends a lot on it, which is one of the rare cases where athletics allows athletes to use aids that are beyond their natural merit.

The evolution of sticks over time explains much of the rise in records to heights unimaginable in the sport. With old technology, rigid poles, Christos Papanicolaou set a world record in October 1970 with a jump of 5.49 m, which today is not enough even for the first heights in the qualifying major competitions. With new technological milestones, six meters has long ceased to be the limit, and the world record bar has hopefully reached 6.22 meters.

There is exactly a pole in the middle, comparisons from season to season cannot be absolutely measurable in this sport. How much better is cosmonaut Armand Dublandis than Sergei Bubka, even though he broke all records before he was 23? Or, conversely, how high could the “King of the Ethers” jump if he had the modern poles of today in his hands, and how far will the record ever go if science develops them even further in the future?

In the “little brother” high jump, everything is much simpler. When an athlete begins his efforts, his only ally is himself, and his opponent is his opponent. How cheerful he is, how purposeful, how fit, how lucky. However, in reality, there is also a pole in the high jump that has dramatically changed the level of competition in a few years, and this pole is named … Dick Fosbury. An athlete who, with a revolutionary technique for that time, gave life to a sport that seemed to have found a ceiling.

Using the old straddle technique, the athletes tried to go over the bar with spectacular scissors. In the early years when they crossed the isthmus, they landed on a sand pit, and a few years later on piles of mats that rudimentarily protected them from a dangerous fall. Over time, foam mattresses were created to provide incomparably greater safety, but no one thought to try a different style that would not force athletes to land on their feet.

The first to dare to change the outdated style was Dick Fosbury, a jumper from Oregon, USA, who seemed unable to enter the cream of the sport. Before he developed his own technique, his record was 2.15m and he didn’t look capable of starring at a very high level in a sport that seemed to be stuck at 2.20m for men, with no chance of lifting bar for just a few points. more.

To change the history of sports, Fosbury thought more like a scientist than an athlete. While still a student, before he was 18 years old, he found in his school library a book about the Finnish jumper Kalevi Kotkas, who used a strange technique at the 1932 and 1936 Olympics, different from the rest of his fellow athletes.

With his knowledge of physics and constant testing on a makeshift mattress, the young Fosbury discovered that if he stepped hard with his outside foot on the last step before jumping and flexed his body with his back to his forearm, then his center of mass would be larger. it’s easy to push it to much greater heights.

The first person he had to convince was his coach Berno Wagner. Initially skeptical, he saw a clear improvement in Fosbury’s training and encouraged him to demonstrate his technique in competition in 1964. The distrust of other athletes and coaches bordered on mockery. This strange style, sending you through the forearm with your back, without even seeing it, at first caused timidity and many ironic comments about its creator.

Fosbury’s perseverance gradually began to win supporters. The local newspaper dubbed the new technique the “Fosbury Gap,” and with that definition it went down in history after it took at least another four years for everyone else’s opinion to begin to change. Now that the new style is working much better, Fosbury easily qualified for the American Trials at the Mexico City Olympics, where he won the gold medal on October 20, 1968 with a 2.24 meters, an Olympic record!

It was the first and last time Fosbury flew so high. Although he was not even 22 years old when he became an Olympic gold medalist, he decided to step aside and pass on to others better than him the responsibility of improving his technique and raising the bar much higher. Apparently, having low self-esteem or absolute knowledge of his abilities, he decided that it was the technique and not his special talent, so in 1968 he rested on his laurels and quietly left the spotlight.

In his autobiography The Wizard of Foz, Fosberry described himself as “one of the worst high jumpers in Oregon” before discovering his new technique! There he also recounted all he had heard from the rest of his fellow athletes when the Fosbury Flop first appeared, with many warning him that “it would be easier to break your neck than to go high over your forearm”.

Its success in 1968 prompted several top athletes to abandon the straddle technique for a new style. At the Olympic Games in Munich, 28 out of 40 divers used the Fosbury flop, and with this technique, the German Ulrike Meyfarth took first place, setting a world record.

It was only a matter of time before the new technique took over and was developed by athletes with more talent than Fosbury. The athletes who started with the straddle technique did not easily absorb the features of the new style, completely changing the work of the years, and it was necessary for the next generation of athletes, who had worked with it from the very beginning without other influences, to take records.

Sara Simeoni set the Fosbury world record in 1978, and Jacek Fsowa did the same in men two years later in 1980. From then until now, all jumpers and jumpers have practiced the Fosbury flop exclusively, setting impregnable (for the old technique) world records. , which reached 2.45 m in men (Javier Sotomayor in 1993) and 2.09 m (Stefka Konstantinova in 1987) in women.

Dick Fosbury passed away on March 12, 2023, almost a week after his 76th birthday (3/6). He was defeated after a long battle with a hematological malignancy that afflicted his lymphatic system, but managed to enjoy the honor and recognition that classical sports owe him for his innovation.

It was a technique that gave new “heaven” to the sport, which seemed to have reached its ceiling, which is happening today. With the men’s world record holding for 30 years and the women’s world record hopefully reaching 36, it’s clear that as soon as the athletes don’t have a pole in their hands to develop and move higher, the high jump again effectively suffer from their ceiling. when another “lunatic” like Fosbury discovers a new technique to take him down…