The Style That Made Every Other One Extinct
The Fosbury flop is a jumping style in the track and field high jump, popularised and perfected by the American athlete Dick Fosbury, whose gold medal at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City put it in front of the world.
Within a short time it had taken over completely, displacing the straddle technique, the Western roll, the Eastern cut-off and the scissors jump as the way to clear a bar. Not one of those survives at elite level.
The part people usually get wrong is the idea that Fosbury invented it out of nowhere. The backwards flop technique had actually been known for years before him. What had been missing was not the idea. It was a safe way to land.
Foam Changed What Was Physically Safe
For most of the event's history, jumpers landed in sandpits or on low piles of matting. That single constraint dictated everything about technique, because athletes had to come down on their feet, or at least land carefully enough to avoid injury.
You cannot go over a bar backwards and land on your feet. The flop puts the athlete down on their shoulders and back, which on sand would be a good way to end a career. The advent of deep foam matting removed the penalty, and jumpers were suddenly free to be far more adventurous about how they landed and therefore far more experimental about how they jumped.
The change also reshaped who could compete. The straddle demanded real strength in the takeoff knee and suited relatively burly athletes such as Valeriy Brumel. The flop let athletes of slender build use coordination to greater effect instead, and reduced the knee injuries that were more common in the older styles.
The Curve Is the Whole Secret
The flop's approach run is its cleverest part. At least the final four or five steps are run in a curve, which lets the athlete lean into the turn, away from the bar.
That lean lowers the centre of gravity before the knee even flexes, which gives a longer period over which to apply the take-off thrust. Then, at take-off, the sudden change from leaning inward to moving outward rotates the body along the axis of the bar. Combined with the rotation around the vertical axis produced by the drive leg, much like an ice skater spinning on one spot, the athlete arrives over the bar supine and at ninety degrees to it, head and shoulders crossing before trunk and legs.
Most athletes use a J shaped approach: three to five strides straight at ninety degrees to the bar, then four or five in the curve. The take-off angle is usually between fifteen and thirty degrees. Too shallow and the jumper travels along the bar and lands on it; too wide and there is not enough time to lay out.
Going Over While Your Middle Goes Under
In flight the athlete progressively arches shoulders, back and legs in a rolling motion, keeping as much of the body as possible below the bar at any given instant. Taken to its limit, this produces the flop's beautiful paradox: it is theoretically possible for the jumper's centre of mass to pass underneath the bar they are clearing.
The details are more finely tuned than they look. The optimal approach speed is not a full-out sprint, and adding strides beyond eight or ten is not recommended unless the athlete has a highly consistent approach and can handle the extra speed. The leg thrust into the air first at take-off, sometimes called the broken leg, is always the one nearer the bar, so a left-footed jumper approaches from the right-hand side.
Even the arms are a variable. Fosbury himself crossed with his hands by his sides, while other athletes hold their arms out to the side or above their heads to optimise how their mass is distributed.
