In six graceful leaps, the Canadian high jumper Derek Drouin won the Olympic gold medal in the event. PHOTOGRAPH BY LUCAS OLENIUK / TORONTO STAR VIA GETTY

Of all the track-and-field disciplines, the high jump had always been the one that held the least appeal for me. There was none of the awesome danger of the pole vault. It didn’t look like a freakish feat of strength or speed. It looked weird. Even the jumpers looked strange—tall and skeletal, all sinew and bone. They could clear a bar nearly eight feet high, the height of a standard ceiling. But on television it didn’t look like they were jumping over a truck. It looked liked they were goofing off. Who, after all, would jump over a truck like that?

It’s called, appropriately, the Fosbury Flop. Instead of running straight ahead, the athletes take a roundabout approach. Instead of jumping, they turn their back, hitch a leg, hop up, arch their shoulders over the bar, and—wait for it—flop. It’s like watching a layup instead of a dunk.

Then, Tuesday night, I saw Derek Drouin.

At first, Drouin doesn’t look particularly special. He has an anodyne appearance, extremely Canadian, and, on the track, a curiously slow start. He doesn’t really run. Instead, it looks like he’s measuring his stride. In tempo, he swings his arms. It’s a deliberate motion, dynamic and graceful. He almost seems to point his toes. When he takes off, his body is perfectly straight, completely controlled. The effect appears at once effortless and incredibly energetic. Unlike the other jumpers, he actually seems to leap_._

Drouin is the reigning world champion. He won bronze in London, and came into Rio as the favorite. Still, so little separates the élite jumpers: only a shiver, an inch. Ukraine’s Bohdan Bondarenko tried to psych Drouin out, “passing” at 2.36 metres. But the risk failed: Bondarenko couldn’t clear 2.38. He’d have to settle for bronze. Drouin, meanwhile, was perfect. Six attempts, six clearances.

After clearing 2.38, he waited for his competitors to match or beat it. They sprinted along their arced approaches. When they jumped, their leading arms flailed. Their feet caught and brought down the bar—if they got that high. Some carried the forward speed of their momentum into the jump, which caused them to crash right through. It was dramatic, desperate.

As I watched them fail, one after another, I thought about Dick Fosbury, the man who invented the eponymous Flop. Legend has it that Fosbury was a mediocre athlete; he didn’t make the cut for his high-school basketball or football teams. He wasn’t even that great a high jumper. Then, pretty much by accident—he was struggling to master the more common techniques—he turned his body around. It so happened that the physics behind his maneuver is sound: the lean improved his angle of takeoff, and the ingenious rolling motion kept his center of gravity below the bar, demanding less energy to clear it. What mattered to Fosbury, though—and what has mattered to athletes and coaches in the fifty years since—is that it worked. Fosbury astounded everyone when he won the 1968 Olympics.

Drouin hasn’t changed the sport like that. But he changed it for me, not only because of how he succeeded but because it helped me see what I had been missing all along: the evidence of invention, the persistent reminder of paradigm shifts. Why wouldn’t you try leaping backwards? Why wouldn’t you try rethinking the run? What wouldn’t you try? Why not?

Drouin’s final attempt was at 2.40 metres. It would have been an Olympic record, but he couldn’t clear the bar. Still, he began to celebrate. In high jumping, you measure your success by your failure. Every meet ends with a miss. It’s a wonderful thing to witness.