Faster Higher Smarter: Bright Ideas That Transformed Sports
The STRADDLE JUMP is more efficient than the scissor All of the jumpers in Mexico City except Fosbury were using this style You take off from the inside foot lift the outside leg and roll over the bar facedown the middle as you’d expect but the donut is different There the center of mass is located in the hole not in the actual donut itself WHY IT WORKS To complete a successful high jump you have to tackle two problems get the middle of your body as high off the ground as possible and arrange all the dangly bits those pesky arms and legs to work to your advantage First things first height This part is actually simple When you jump you just push off as hard as possible simple but certainly not easy Understanding the dangly bits Not so simple First you have to know about center of mass That’s the scientific name for middle of your body Locating an object’s center of mass is easy if we’re talking about a simple shape see diagram With a block or a ball the center of mass is right smack in 8 Center of mass
The FOSBURY FLOP is a very efficient jumping style You take off on the outside foot twist your body and go over the bar backwards arching your back as you do Something similar happens with the human body Your center of mass changes depending on your posture Stand up straight and your center of mass is in your stomach Lift your arms and it moves up a little And if you bend over your center of mass drops and is located outside your body So suppose you jump hard enough to raise your center of mass to a height of five feet Does that mean you can clear a bar set at that level Not necessarily The height you can actually clear depends on how you arrange those dangly bits in other words your jumping style 9
5 feet To clear a 5-foot bar with a SCISSOR JUMP you have to lift your center of mass quite a lot higher than the bar maybe 5 feet 6 inches For a successful STRADDLE JUMP your center of mass only needs to be a little higher than the bar maybe 5 feet 3 inches Using the FOSBURY FLOP the neatest jumping style of the three your center of gravity can actually be lower than the bar maybe 4 feet 10 inches IF NOT DICK THEN DEBBIE During the same years that Fosbury was developing his technique Canadian high jumper Debbie Brill had independently started using the same technique At the age of 16 using her Brill bend jumping style Debbie became the first North American woman to clear 6 feet Debbie Brill at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles Search for 1968 Olympics high jump to find videos of Dick Fosbury’s jumps 10
INVENTING THE FLOP How did Fosbury come up with this great idea By accident Like many athletes Fosbury had a hard time with the straddle technique To do it properly an athlete’s timing and coor dination need to be perfect and Fosbury’s weren’t In high school he could only clear 5 feet 4 inches and was struggling in compe titions Desperate for a way to improve his performance he asked his coach if he could try the scissor jump in the next competition And that’s when everything changed Using the scissors I make 5-4 Fosbury explained later And I am sitting there looking at the bar at 5-6 trying to figure out Now how can I jump higher I know I have to lift my butt up because that is usually where you knock the bar off So as I try to lift my hips up my shoulders go back a little bit and I clear 5-6 It was kind of a lazy scissors At 5-8 I lift my hips a little higher and my shoulders go back a little further and I make it At 5-10 same thing By this time I am going over the bar flat on my back I’m upside down from everyone else into kind of a back layout I go out at 6 feet and nobody knows what the heck I’m doing Fosbury kept using the flop and in his senior year he placed second in the state high-school championship But his college coach wasn’t a fan of the new technique and kept pushing Fosbury to learn the straddle Finally when Fosbury could only manage 6 feet 4 inches using the straddle but broke a school record of 6 feet 10 inches using the flop his coach said We’re going to develop this thing By 1968 Fosbury had done just that and nobody ever suggested he try the straddle jump again IT’S THE PITS Prior to the 1960s the landing pits for high jump were filled with sand or wood chips Landing on your shoulders from a height of 7 feet would have been very painful and dangerous It was only during the 1960s that people started using foam rubber pads several feet high in the landing area So the Fosbury flop wouldn’t have been practical or safe until around the time Dick Fosbury invented it 11
