'True legend' Olympic champion dies aged 76

Olympic champion Dick Fosbury, who revolutionised the high jump with the “Fosbury Flop”, has died at the age of 76.

He died peacefully in his sleep after a “brief recurrence of lymphoma”, his agent Ray Schulte said.

Fosbury, who won gold at the Mexico Olympics in 1968, developed a technique that involved going backwards over the bar instead of forwards.

He was able to create the new style after rubber landing mats – replacing sand, sawdust or woodchip surfaces – became more common in the 1960s.

It meant Fosbury was able to abandon the previous scissor technique – in which jumpers took off sideways to the bar, lifting one leg over at a time – and still land safely.

Fosbury, who was 6ft 4in, leapt at an angle and went over on his back.

In Mexico, he set a then-Olympic record of 2.24m to take the title and change the sport forever.

The technique, which gave him a much lower centre of mass, became known as the Fosbury Flop and has since been adopted by all high jumpers.

By the next Olympics, in Munich, 28 of the 40 jumpers were using Fosbury’s technique.

The Montreal Games in 1976 was the last Olympics in which a high jumper won using a technique other than the Fosbury Flop.

The style has been used by business leaders and university professors as a way of studying innovation and the willingness to take chances.

“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 high jump champion in 2012, Erik Kynard Jr, said the Fosbury Flop was “literally genius”, adding: “It takes huge courage, obviously.

“And (it) took huge courage at the time to even consider something so dangerous. Due to the equipment then, it was something that was a little on edge to attempt.”

Fosbury began experimenting with a new technique in the early 1960s while a teenager at Medford High School in Oregon.

“I knew I had to change my body position, and that’s what started first the revolution, and over the next two years, the evolution,” Fosbury said in a 2014 interview with The Corvallis Gazette-Times.

“During my junior year, I carried on with this new technique, and each meet I continued to evolve or change, but I was improving. My results were getting better.”

Initially, the idea attracted a certain amount of ridicule, the term Fosbury Flop credited to the Medford Mail-Tribune, which wrote the headline “Fosbury Flops Over the Bar” after one of his high school meetings.

The reporter wrote that Fosbury looked like a fish flopping in a boat.

But the man himself liked the phrase. “It’s poetic, it’s alliterative, it’s a conflict,” he said.

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Fosbury graduated from Oregon State University in 1972 with a degree in civil engineering and co-owned an engineering firm in Idaho, where he lived from 1977.

He was married with a son and two step-daughters.

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