Faster Higher Smarter: Bright Ideas That Transformed Sports
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
Chapter 2 POLE VAULT FLEXIBLE FIBERGLASS reached its limit Maybe human beings just weren’t meant to clear a bar much more than 4 5 meters off the ground Or maybe we were In 1960 something amazing happened All of a sudden Olympic pole-vaulters were once again reaching new heights In 1960 American Don Bragg cleared 4 7 meters an Olympic record In 1962 American John Uelses beat the magic 16-feet barrier That’s almost 4 9 meters In 1964 Fred Hansen hit 5 1 meters By the 1990s some athletes were clearing 6 meters What the heck happened Pole vaulting goes way back way way back In 500 BCE Greeks were using spears to vault And for centuries after smart people in various cultures used the technique as a shortcut to get across canals or streams without having to walk to the nearest bridge It’s no surprise then that the sport made an appearance in the first modern Olympics in 1896 In those early days pole-vaulting ath letes pushed themselves to greater and greater heights But by the 1950s things had leveled off it seemed that the sport had REACHING NEW HEIGHTS The winning heights for Olympic Games between 1896 and 2012 Notice how the heights level off after 1950 but then start to climb again beginning in 1960 12
FISHING FOR INSPIRATION Art Meyers happened If you’ve never heard of Art Meyers don’t worry Most people haven’t But pole vaulting’s giant leap forward or up owes a great deal to his big idea Art was no ordinary guy He never finished high school and he spent his life working on the family farm but he was a genius with mechanical things When he retired he went to live in Costa Mesa California where his son-in-law Herb Jenks ran a factory that made fishing poles out of a new material called fiberglass created by sticking glass fibers into resin sheets and molding them into the desired shape Fiberglass is very neat Light strong and flexible it is perfect for hauling in fish that have no intention of being caught After a visit to his brother’s house in Sherman Oaks and an afternoon spent watching his nephew practice pole vaulting in the backyard with a standard metal pole Art decided it might be perfect for something else too Urged on by Art Herb Jenks made a vaulting pole out of two tuna-fishing rods and sent it to his young relative The boy used it to clear 3 3 meters not bad for a high schooler The rest as they say is history During a visit to Costa Mesa athletics coach Virgil Jackson heard about the pole The next morning Jackson was waiting for Jenks at his fac tory I haven’t slept all night he explained You’ve got to make those poles and sell them Jenks did and Bob Mathias Jackson’s star athlete used a fiberglass pole during the 1952 Olympics when he won the decathlon A CENTURY OF PREJUDICE Women’s pole vault became an Olympic sport in 2000 104 years after the men’s event was introduced What took so long Apparently some men didn’t think women had enough upper-body strength to compete at elite levels American Stacy Dragila probably had something to say about that In that first Olympic women’s event she had enough upper body strength to take gold with a height of 4 6 meters That result would have got her into the finals of the men’s competition in the 1964 Olympic Games Stacy Dragila setting an American record of 4 75 meters in 2004 13
