Olympic champion Dick Fosbury, who revolutionised the excessive soar with the “Fosbury Flop”, has died on the age of 76.
He died peacefully in his sleep after a “brief recurrence of lymphoma”, his agent Ray Schulte mentioned.
Fosbury, who gained gold on the Mexico Olympics in 1968, developed a way that concerned going backwards over the bar as a substitute of forwards.
He was capable of create the brand new fashion after rubber touchdown mats – changing sand, sawdust or woodchip surfaces – grew to become extra widespread within the Nineteen Sixties.
It meant Fosbury may abandon the earlier scissor approach – through which jumpers took off sideways to the bar, lifting one leg over at a time – and nonetheless land safely.
Fosbury, who was 6ft 4in, leapt at an angle and went over on his again.
In Mexico, he set a then-Olympic file of two.24m to take the title and alter the game eternally.
The approach, which gave him a a lot decrease centre of mass, grew to become often called the Fosbury Flop and has since been adopted by all excessive jumpers.
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By the following Olympics, in Munich, 28 of the 40 jumpers have been utilizing Fosbury’s approach.
The Montreal Games in 1976 was the final Olympics through which a excessive jumper gained utilizing a way aside from the Fosbury Flop.
The fashion has been utilized by enterprise leaders and college professors as a approach of learning innovation and the willingness to take probabilities.
“The world legend is probably used too often,” Olympic champion Michael Johnson tweeted.
“Dick Fosbury was a true LEGEND! He changed an entire event forever with a technique that looked crazy at the time but the result made it the standard.”
The Olympic excessive soar champion in 2012, Erik Kynard Jr, mentioned the Fosbury Flop was “literally genius”, including: “It takes huge courage, obviously.
“And (it) took big braveness on the time to even think about one thing so harmful. Due to the tools then, it was one thing that was somewhat on edge to try.”
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Fosbury began experimenting with a new technique in the early 1960s while a teenager at Medford High School in Oregon.
“I knew I needed to change my physique place, and that is what began first the revolution, and over the following two years, the evolution,” Fosbury said in a 2014 interview with The Corvallis Gazette-Times.
“During my junior 12 months, I carried on with this new approach, and every meet I continued to evolve or change, however I used to be enhancing. My outcomes have been getting higher.”
Fosbury co-owned an engineering agency after retiring from athletics. Pic: AP
Initially, the concept attracted a certain quantity of ridicule, the time period Fosbury Flop credited to the Medford Mail-Tribune, which wrote the headline “Fosbury Flops Over the Bar” after one in every of his highschool conferences.
The reporter wrote that Fosbury appeared like a fish flopping in a ship.
But the person himself favored the phrase. “It’s poetic, it’s alliterative, it’s a conflict,” he mentioned.
Fosbury graduated from Oregon State University in 1972 with a level in civil engineering and co-owned an engineering agency in Idaho, the place he lived from 1977.
He was married with a son and two step-daughters.
Source: information.sky.com”
