Innovation essentials: How the “Fosbury Flop” demolished a “local maximum”

- In October of 1968, Dick Fosbury set a new world high jump record at the Mexico Olympics.
- The other competitors were stuck at a “local maximum” that permitted only incremental improvements.
- By treating the high jump as a scientific problem, he developed the “Fosbury Flop” — and revolutionized the sport.
In October of 1968, 21-year-old Dick Fosbury, a self-proclaimed awkward and uncoordinated engineering student from Oregon State University travelled to Mexico City with the U.S. Olympic team to compete in the high jump competition. No one—not his coach, his parents, or his teammates—could have predicted he would leave a permanent mark on the field of Athletics. A contender, but far from a favorite, he wasn’t naturally skilled in the sport. Yet, at the packed Estadio Olimpico Universitario, Dick Fosbury “turned the event upside down” and set a new world record. Now widely considered one of the most influential jumpers in the history of track and field, he used the occasion to debut his immediately famous “Fosbury Flop.” Dick didn’t set out to forever change the event; he just wanted to get over the bar.
During training, back in high school, Fosbury recalls he “gravitated toward the oldest style in high jump history, the scissors, but people didn’t use it anymore. Everyone was using either the straddle or the western roll,” a technique that involved “vigorously kicking the lead leg” up over the bar. The trailing leg then swung up to meet it as the body contorted, head facing the ground, for a three-point landing with both legs and hands.

Fosbury knew he was terrible at the scissors, the straddle, and the western roll, though he and his teammates practiced dutifully, working steadily toward incremental improvements. The goal was to consistently jump just a tiny bit higher, to exceed their personal records, and to stay within the rules and boundaries of the game. The gains were marginal, and the critics on the sidelines were fierce. He remembers, “There were always a million experts to tell you why what you were doing was wrong.”
Making minimal strides was the improvement strategy high jumpers had employed since the dawn of the sport: centimeter by measured centimeter. Like everyone else, Fosbury worked tirelessly to get better at the tried-and-true techniques. Someone documented his many efforts using old, black and white, 35 mm film. Anyone who chooses to Google him can easily find footage from his early high school and college training days, practicing the scissor versus the straddle, back and forth, back and forth, slowly getting a shred better each time.
Fosbury recognized incremental improvements weren’t making a hill of a difference in his rankings. He needed to change how he jumped if he was going to keep up with the others and stay on the team. At home, at night, after another humiliating day at practice, still sweaty from exertion, he thought, “There’s just got to be a better way. Something new. Something totally different that no one’s ever thought of or seen before.”

Fosbury was an engineer in training, after all. He had a logical mind and a natural, insatiable curiosity about how things were designed, created, and enhanced. He attacked his performance on the track like a scientific problem that needed to be solved. He studied books on high jumping improvement, mental preparedness in sports, physical stamina, and endurance; he collected and analyzed data about his every move, making minor tweaks here and there to gain a centimeter or two; he sketched diagrams of multiple scenarios and crunched mathematical equations factoring in speed, weight, and the laws of gravity. Rather than looking for incremental gains, he was looking for something that would change the entire playing field, even if it didn’t allow him to jump higher straight away. He needed a solution that could potentially lead to jumping significantly higher, not just an incremental inch or two.
Early into Fosbury’s high school career, high jumpers landed in pits built from hard sand or sawdust. In the early 1960s, a key modification occurred on the terrain. The once hard sand pits were replaced with softer, deeper foam matting, which paved the way for new jumping and landing styles. The field was ripe for invention.
Fosbury was working toward his goal in a different way than everyone else. Unlike the other kids on his team, who spent most of their time striving for their next incremental gain, focusing down on a single improvement, and iterating from it, Fosbury wanted to be miles ahead—literal leaps and bounds—than the rest. He pushed himself by experimenting; using dramatic, never-before-seen-or-attempted variances in approaches, take offs, contortions, and landings.
Eventually, and utilizing the laws of physics in terms of speed and velocity, Fosbury “landed” (awkwardly) on a method that allowed him to smash his own record and achieve a significant height gain: from 5 ft. to 6 ft., 7 in. He gained over a foot and a half by employing a mid-air rotation, turning his back to the bar, instead of approaching it head-on, and landing backward on his head; a move that would not have been feasible if:
1. The landing terrain had not recently been changed to foam, and critically,
2. Fosbury had not attempted such a daring and dangerous new move.
He took his “discovery” and ran with it. “The advantage,” Fosbury said, “from a physics standpoint is, it allows the jumper to run at the bar with more speed and, with the arch in your back, you could actually clear the bar and keep your center of gravity at or below the bar, so it was much more efficient.”
“The Fosbury Flop” was born, and though it “looked like a guy falling off the back of a truck,” according to one journalist, its effectiveness and originality were undisputed. Fosbury’s unorthodox technique earned him the gold medal in the Mexico City ’68 Olympics with an unprecedented jump of 7 feet 4 ¼ inches. It also earned him the attention of the world and forever revolutionized the sport.
The Fosbury Flop is a visual and lasting example of how the concept of a Local Maximum and its limitations can be applied to real-world situations.
Following his groundbreaking performance, “The Fosbury Flop” became the dominant “gold standard” competitive style in the high jump. He wasn’t the best jumper, and if everyone had been climbing the same mountain, he would never have won. He won the gold because he had the ingenuity to look for a better and higher mountain to climb, while everyone else was stuck at a Local Maximum on another mountain. In a world of incremental improvement, Dick Fosbury broke the mold.
The Fosbury Flop is a visual and lasting example of how the concept of a Local Maximum and its limitations can be applied to real-world situations. Fosbury’s initiative, his willingness to iterate and experiment for the best solution, to explore something totally unheard of, and to teach himself how to master it, is a testament to the power of innovation.