Dick Fosbury’s route into high jump was fairly straightforward: he liked sport, and wasn’t any good at anything else. He hadn’t got into the football team, and despite being one of the tallest kids in school had been no more successful at basketball. He tried athletics and, having had a go at a few disciplines, found this was the one at which he was least useless. But Fosbury still spent many years towards the wrong end of the usefulness scale. He likes to tell a story to illustrate just how average he was before he perfected the technique that was to astonish the world and make his name famous: in the mid-60s, while he was at college. “Someone bet me I couldn’t clear a stuffed leather chair,” he says. “Not only did I lose the bet, I also broke my hand in the crash landing.”

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At the time there were two common methods of clearing a bar: the scissors jump, where the athlete threw first one leg and then the other over the bar before landing on his feet, as modelled here by 1920 gold-medallist Richmond Landon, and the straddle, and its variant the western roll, which saw the athlete fling himself over the bar face down, as demonstrated by 1964 winner Valeriy Brumel. The scissors jump had been considered a bit old-hat since the end of the 19th century, when the straddle started to take over. Though the technique had changed a bit over time, there had been no significant alterations since 1936, when the IAAF first decided that athletes didn’t have to clear the bar leg first.

“As a young boy our teacher taught us both the western roll and the scissors style,” Fosbury told me when we discussed his breakthrough in 2008. “I felt more comfortable with the scissors style and used that reasonably well until I reached high school, at the age of 16, when my new coach explained to me the limitations of that style. He and I worked to try to teach me the western roll, but with very little success.”

That is to put it mildly. Fosbury’s best effort using the western roll was a mere 5ft 4in (1.63m), more than 60cm (23.5in) short of the world record at the time and a height that wouldn’t have impressed anyone even in the first half of the 19th century. Given that by the time he stopped growing he stood 6ft 4in tall without jumping at all, there was only one logical conclusion: he was a hopeless high-jumper.

But he was also persistent. “In 1963, I asked the coach if I could return back to the scissors style, and he didn’t encourage me, but he let me make the decision,” Fosbury told me. “In the very next meet, as I was attempting a new personal best, I felt I had to do something different to clear the bar and I tried lifting my hips, which caused my shoulders to go back, and I succeeded. I made a new height, I tried again, and successively I was able to clear six inches higher than my previous best, and that change made me competitive, it kept me in the game, and I converted from sitting on the bar to laying flat on my back.”

In a sport where improvements are normally measured in fractions of inches, any technique that allowed an athlete to improve his personal best by half a foot in a single afternoon clearly merited serious investigation. Over the next two years, Fosbury honed what was to become known as the Fosbury Flop. “I guess it did look kind of weird at first,” he said, “but it felt so natural that, like all good ideas, you just wonder why no one had thought of it before me.” (A couple of people have claimed that they did, most notably the Canadian future world No1 Debbie Brill, who was developing the “Brill Bend” at around the same time, and was videoed using the technique in 1966. “I was quite shocked when I saw Fosbury jump the first time,” she said. “I thought I was the only one doing it.”)

By 1965 he had become a successful student athlete and his style given its name, first used on a photograph caption in his hometown newspaper, the Medford Mail-Tribune. “Intuitively I liked the contradiction: a flop that could be a success,” he told me. “It was descriptive, it was alliterative, and it fit.” But still nobody took him seriously. “Everybody just thought, ‘It’s pretty funny and everything, but he’ll never do anything,’” he recalled.

He had done well enough to earn a partial scholarship to Oregon State University, where he continued to work on the western roll with his coach, Berny Wagner. Fosbury contends that this was because Wagner thought he would never achieve anything with the flop. “He and I differ on this story,” recalls Wagner, who insists it was the athlete’s idea. “He told me he wanted to be a good jumper and he was tired of being laughed at. I said, ‘Well, we’ll work you on the straddle.’”

But Wagner was no fan of the flop, which he considered “a shortcut to mediocrity” until, one day in the summer of 1966, he decided to capture the flop on video for posterity. He set the bar at 6ft 6in, and filmed Fosbury sailing over it. Reviewing the footage, he saw that his pupil had cleared the bar by a good six inches. “That,” he said, “was when I first thought he was going to be a high jumper.”

But still Fosbury continued to fail to set the world alight: a year before the 1968 Olympics he had risen to a world ranking of 61. Even by the time of the Olympic trials, held a month before the Games began, he was not considered a likely medallist. He was the final qualifier in the event, snatching third place by a whisker. The Guardian’s John Rodda, covering the trials, was not convinced of his potential and described him as “the curiosity of the team”.

The greatest problem Fosbury posed to those covering the sport was how they should describe his technique. The Los Angeles Times wrote that he “goes over the bar like a guy being pushed out of a 30-storey window”. Sports Illustrated said that “he charges up from slightly to the left of centre with a gait that may call to mind a two-legged camel” and that having flung himself over the bar back first “he extends himself like a slightly apprehensive man lying back on a chaise longue that’s too short for him”. The athlete himself, meanwhile, described it as follows: “I take off on my right, or outside, foot. Then I turn my back to the bar, arch my back over the bar and then kick my legs out to clear the bar.” If it was hard to describe, it seemed equally difficult to emulate. The New York Times reported that no other student at Oregon State had managed it, despite two years of trying. “Sometimes I see movies,” Fosbury said, “and I really wonder how I do it.”

He arrived in Mexico an unknown, having never competed outside his homeland, and did not spend his time there with the myopic focus of a likely champion. Instead he hung out with the javelin thrower Gary Stenlund, who had brought his campervan down from America. On the night before the opening ceremony they drove to the Aztec pyramids at Teotihuacan with a couple of swimmers from the 1964 Games, Cynthia Goyette and Donna De Varona. “We stayed out there all night,” Fosbury said. “People were cooking soup over campfires and yelling, ‘Hey, Gringo! Come have some soup!’ We shared their food and drank beer and crashed out in the van or slept in the pyramids—I don’t really remember. The next morning, we got caught in this incredible traffic jam and missed the opening ceremony. But that night at the pyramids, I’ll always remember it. It was wonderful.”

Much of the next fortnight passed in similar fashion. In all the time between his arrival and his competition Fosbury practised jumping only once, and even that session was curtailed by a rainstorm. This wasn’t so unusual: he found little benefit from jumping in private, having discovered that only the rigours of competition, the heady cocktail of pressure and adrenaline, could truly motivate him.

He would need all the motivation he could get: the men’s high jump final in Mexico was gruelling even for the audience, lasting more than four hours. It was decided that the competition should start at 2m, a measly 6ft 6in. Every time the bar was raised a committee of five men in blazers and hats spent several minutes measuring everything, and they had done it three times before Yugoslavia’s Miodrag Todosijevic became the first man to be eliminated on the day’s 42nd jump. By then the 80,000-strong crowd had noticed the guy with the funny action. At first they laughed, and then they started to cheer.

“Psychologically, I was extremely benefitted by the actions of the crowd, who began to notice me,” Fosbury told me. “I felt their focus, and I was able to channel that attention into a high level of intensity, raising but trying to control my level of excitement.”

Fosbury was in his element. By the time he sailed over the bar at 2.18m, his fourth successive first-time success, only two other people – his fellow American Ed Caruthers, and the Soviet Valentin Gavrilov – were still in the competition. He had a medal. All three cleared 2.20m at the first attempt, but when Gavrilov failed at 2.22m Fosbury was sure of at least a silver. He still had not missed a jump, giving him a massive advantage over Caruthers, who had failed five times.

The bar was set at 2.24m, 7ft 4in, an Olympic record height. The crowd were so engrossed at this point that when Ethiopia’s Mamo Wolde, the first marathon runner, arrived in the stadium he was barely noticed. Fosbury and Caruthers both failed twice; the former knew that if Caruthers failed with his third, or if he succeeded with his own, gold was surely his.

It wasn’t just its execution which set Fosbury’s jump apart from his rivals’: his run-up was longer, his preparations lengthier. He stood, readying himself for his final attempt, rocking from his heels to his toes, clenching and unclenching his fists, eyes focused on the floor, for every second of the two minutes he was allowed. And then he bounced towards his target, launched himself into the air and sailed over. Caruthers failed again. It was all over.

Two days of unremitting attention later Fosbury climbed back into Stenlund’s campervan and set off for Mexico’s mountains. “I had a horrible time dealing with all the attention, really,” he said. “It was too much. I was a small-town kid who did something way beyond what I had ever expected to do. I like the attention, but I wanted it to be over at a point. It didn’t work that way.”

His innovation was not immediately embraced, partly because of safety concerns. Fosbury himself had been warned to stop jumping at 16 when a backache was traced to two compressed vertebrae, in all likelihood a jumping-related injury. A second doctor told him that the injury was unlikely to get any worse and he might as well keep going. The issue was that, while at the top level athletes jumped into deep padded mattresses, in high schools falls were often cushioned by little more than a pile of sawdust. “Kids imitate champions,” Payton Jordan, the US Olympic coach, said in Mexico. “If they try to imitate Fosbury he will wipe out an entire generation of high jumpers, because they will all have broken necks.” This anticipated chiropractic epidemic, of course, never happened.

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Soon after Fosbury returned to the United States he went on the Johnny Carson show, with Bill Cosby – once an aspiring high-jumper himself – and Raquel Welch. He was asked to demonstrate his technique, but he slipped on the shiny studio floor and fell over. It was pretty much the last anyone saw of the Fosbury Flop being performed by its inventor, who drifted away from athletics and failed with a last-ditch attempt to qualify for the Munich Olympics in 1972. “I was mentally exhausted,” he said. “There was too much attention. People put me on a pedestal and kept me there. I didn’t want to be on a pedestal. I received my medal and I wanted to be back on the ground with everyone else.”

But generations of athletes since have guaranteed that his name lives on. Juri Tarmak may have straddled his way to gold in 1972, but since then no one has won a high jump medal of any colour using any technique other than the Fosbury Flop. “It was a moment that changed my life,” Fosbury has said. “It brought me gifts, not necessarily monetary. I have met presidents and kings, seen the world and shared my life with wonderful people.”

Watching footage of the 1968 final, what is striking is this: to anyone watching at the time, Fosbury’s technique would have seemed totally bizarre. To anyone watching now, it is everyone else who looks weird. Of course, it might all have been so different – and arguably quite a lot more entertaining. If the IAAF had only permitted high-jumpers to take off using two feet rather than one, a diminutive 20-year-old acrobat called Dick Browning would have smashed the world record in 1954 and his favoured method – a lengthy gymnastic tumble culminating in an epic backwards somersault – might even now dominate the sport. Browning Bounce, anyone?