Above all, those born in 1969 claim that this was the best year to be born, a year of ingenuity, man’s arrival on the moon, belief that the atom and progress will end all mankind’s problems would . . , but those who had sense back then, who went to high school or university, will contradict them and tell them that there was no year like 1968 that moved humanity more, that shaped it more. May 1968, Berkeley, the hippie movement, the Vietnam War, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Prague Spring, pop, the Decade of Miracles and after the massacre at the Zócalo in Mexico City itself, in October the Olympics They symbolized all that and more. The games of Tommie Smith and John Carlos and their black glove on the podium, black power, conscious youth, Bob Beamon jumping 8.90 m and Dick Fosbury, a boy from Portland, Oregon, barely 21 years old, backwards jump height. It was the great revolution in athletics, the birth of the Fosbury flop, and its founder, the father of the revolution, died yesterday at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, “peacefully asleep,” according to his agent, the victim of a 2008 relapse diagnosed lymphoma. He was a middle-aged, white-haired man, a civil engineer living on a farm in the great prairies of the West, a fan of snowboarding in the winter and mountain biking in the summer, and a committed underprivileged, fighter against racism, and even underdog candidate for Congress for the Democratic Party. On March 6th he had turned 76 years old.
Just mentioning his last name creates a domino effect, a chain. Its three syllables evoke an image. The image – a horizontal athlete, navy blue tank top, white shorts, a white adidas on one foot and a black one on the other, frozen on his back, arms floppy at his sides, head slightly twisted, perched on a pole – recalls awakening one moment, on October 20, 1968, in a stadium, the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City.
Fosbury came to his revolutionary style because of one flaw: his inability to assimilate the complex belly roll. He could only jump with a catchy tune and wouldn’t stop until he had jumped backwards. He began practicing years before Mexico ’68. He reached the bar and turned, then did a backflip and went over it. The move allowed him to gain height by keeping his center of gravity under the bar, which required less jumping power. Thus, after 12 jumps, he defeated Gavrilov and Carruthers in the Olympic final, breaking the Olympic record at 2.24 meters and touching 2.29, by which he would have beaten the hapless Soviet’s world champion Valery Brumel, the supreme species of perfection had himself at one Broke a leg in a motorcycle accident. Brumel saved his record, but the next day his style began to die.
“All the kids who did athletics in San Sebastián, as soon as we saw him, went to Anoeta to jump on our backs,” says Ramón Cid, triple jumper and coach; “and it was hilarious.” And so all over the world. The debate about the superiority of one style over another did not last long. Scooter purists could still enjoy a few more years thanks to the awesome Yatchenko, who raised the record to 2.35 meters. The current of 2.45, the height of a soccer goal crossbar, held by Cuban Sotomayor was challenged with the Fosbury flop, the only track and field technique known by the name of its inventor. Fosbury finished Mexico 68 and returned to his faculty. The dean gave him a choice: athletics or a career. He hung up his shoes and became an engineer.
For Luis María Garriga, saying Fosbury means all that and something else. For Garriga, who was Spain’s best high jumper in his youth – he had the national record at 2.12 meters – Fosbury is also a noise, a throaty noise and a scream. “Of course, it wasn’t like it is today, that everything that happens somewhere comes to the four corners immediately on television, via satellite, via the Internet,” says Garriga, one of the 13 participants in the Olympic finals in Mexico, one of them 12 Fosbury Enthusiastic Athletes; “But of course we had heard from Fosbury about his way of jumping. We even had a film that we ran through the Moviola hundreds of times to analyze. So I wasn’t too surprised by Fosbury either. What I remember most vividly is his concentration. Fosbury went to his mark on the ground, stood there for more than two minutes, and began moving his hands and making noises in his throat. And it seemed as if he had forgotten the world. So much so that impatient cries of “Come on! Come on!” could be heard from the as always silent stands.
The silence. The chronicles say that for the first time in a game the stadium did not celebrate the entry of the marathon winner, Ethiopian Mamo Wolde. And not out of antipathy, but because it coincided with a jump from Fosbury. And Jorge González Amo, a middle-distance runner and 1,500-meter sprinter, remembers how, on the morning of qualifying, spectators crowded around the corner of the stadium where the Saltadero was held. “It was wonderful. Those were the best games,” says González Amo; “Modern athletics was born, the tartan track, the fiberglass poles, the foam mats to land on after jumping, without which the Fosbury would have been impossible since they otherwise would have broken their necks in sand, sawdust, or serous pits, as these were before.”
The best thing about Fosbury’s style, his revolution, his way of taking on the bar, was that it allowed for a lot more speed. “He opened up the high jump to a type of athlete that wasn’t worth it before, the very tall and thin ones,” says Arturo Ortiz, still the national record holder (2.34m) and coach of the promising Gema Martín Pozuelo; “Before, when the belly roll, when Valery Brumel was a myth, the prototype was an athlete with very powerful legs, very strong. You couldn’t get that much speed with the last three steps up to the beat. In all disciplines of athletics, the maxim applies: the faster, the better. And with the Fosbury Flop, you can get everything done faster.
Ortiz has Fosbury’s image etched “into his cortex” like he has Beamons or the one on podium 200: Smith, Norman and John Carlos, fists raised, black glove, Jesse Owens. And he does an exercise in abstraction, reduction, purification. “It’s exciting, something new under the sun,” he says; “He had the courage of geniuses to let his intuition carry him away, to be the first to do it. The value of the pioneer. According to Kandisky, it’s so easy to paint a blank canvas. Nobody had dared before. That’s what happened at Fosbury.”
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