'Wizard of Foz' Details One Of Track's Great Innovators 

By Doug Binder, DyeStat Editor

Rocking back and forth, clenching his fists, Dick Fosbury stood on the high jump apron and prepared for his upcoming attempt as if he were a rechargeable battery plugged into an electrical outlet.

In those moments before his approach, Fosbury summoned energy and emotion. The laughter. The criticism. Emotional wounds. Anxiety. Competitive zeal. The hopes of people he knew were watching back home on live TV in Medford, Oregon.

All of it balled up inside him. There was a lot going in 1968 and most of the daily news were fraught with tension and fear and anger.

Fosbury, for a few unforgettable moments in Mexico City 50 years ago this month, made millions of people around the world briefly forget about the world's troubles. He did something so unusual – flying over a high jump bar backwards – that he was considered a one-of-a-kind athletic marvel.

The new book "The Wizard of Foz: Dick Fosbury's One-Man High-Jump Revolution," by author Bob Welch with Foreward by Ashton Eaton (Skyhorse Publishing) – tells one of track and field's most astonishing and unique stories.

Fosbury, and his innovative "Fosbury Flop" technique, reached the mountaintop Oct. 20 when he won the gold medal with a new Olympic record of 7 feet, 4.25 inches (2.24m).

It was his only major international competition. Within a year, he'd leave the high jump behind to pursue his degree in Civil Engineering from Oregon State University. When he made a comeback attempt in 1972, it was too little, too late.

Fosbury had no regrets.

Within a few more years, the Fosbury Flop became the standard method for high jumping in the United States and around the world. The man who re-taught the world how to fling oneself over a high jump bar moved on with life.

Welch's rich storytelling, informed every step of the way by Fosbury, delves deep into the origins of the revolution. In the early 1960s, in Medford, Ore., Fosbury wanted nothing more than to make the high school track team – and stay on it. A traumatic accident that resulted in the death of his younger brother, and his parents' subsequent divorce, molded him.

He was not a contrarian. He was a young jumper who couldn't pull off the Western roll, or straddle, which was then the only style anybody of note used, or taught.

Fosbury tried recycling the the antiquated "scissors" style, and his body naturally leaned backward.

"I didn't change my style," Fosbury later said. "It changed inside me."

On a fateful night at the Grants Pass Rotary Invitational, on April 20, 1963, Fosbury turned heads with his curious deviation from the norm. Puzzled spectators were at a loss for how to describe it.

"Looks like a guy taking a nap on a picnic table with his feet over the edge," someone said.

Welch’s detailed description of the time and place where Fosbury’s idea was incubated and put into practice offers the context necessary to help readers understand how, and why, this happened.

Fosbury was the right guy at the right time. And the foam Port-a-Pits that were beginning to appear coincided with the new style that some considered unsafe.

One of the more astonishing aspects of Fosbury’s rise was the fact that he faced opposition, at least initially, from his coaches in both high school and college.

As Welch writes:

Nobody wanted to endorse Fosbury and his style as something that might not only be working for Dick but might also work for other jumpers. Nobody thought Dick was “on to something here.” Said (Oregon State coach Berny) Wagner shortly after Dick broke the OSU record: “I wouldn’t advise anybody to try Fosbury’s method just because he uses it. I just don’t know enough about it. Nobody does.”

Coaches, including Fosbury’s own, didn’t understand his success. There was no blueprint for how to teach a technique that had never been seen before. They were blind to the realization, which would come later, that it was a more efficient method to get a body over the bar.

When Fosbury cleared 7 feet he became the first human to ever clear that height with something other than the belly-over-the-bar straddle.

When pioneers dare to shoot for the sky, people’s expectations soar as well. Inventors constantly work against an archenemy, “the unknown,” the challenge of going where nobody has gone before.

When 1968 began, Fosbury and his newfangled backwards jumping style were considered a novelty. The best jumpers in the world considered him to be no threat whatsoever leading into an Olympic year.

Over a span of months, beginning with winter indoors meets and a series of new PRs, Fosbury proved he was onto something. And those who mocked him, or thought he would surely break his neck, were proven wrong.

Fosbury was not only the visionary who put into action what his body was telling him to do, he was also strong and agile enough to fly higher than any jumper in the world. Like many young people in the 1960s, he was leaving conformity behind and venturing into uncharted space.  

Fosbury’s tale also has moments of drama, crises that that not only shaped the man, but make-or-break jumps on the field of competition that threatened to end the journey prematurely. 

In Mexico City, Welch writes, the biggest cheers in the stadium were for the Fosbury Flop – an acrobatic movement that looked so simple and yet was still completely foreign to the world. Over two days of competition, Fosbury’s one-man revolution changed everything about his sport.

The high-altitude Olympic camp and Trials at Echo Summit, and the Games that followed in Mexico City, also changed Fosbury.

He returned to Medford as a hero, but he also possessed a worldview about racial equality and fairness that was not yet the norm in his all-white hometown in the 1960s. The protests of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, calling attention to the plight of African-Americans, had merit. To that end, Fosbury was ahead of his time in more ways than one.

As a track and field icon and Olympian, the Flop and the ideals go hand in hand. He has been an ambassador for the sport, and a role model for kids everywhere, for 50 years.

On Oct. 19 at Oregon State in Corvallis, there will be a ceremonial unveiling of a new statue to honor Fosbury. 

It's an honor that is long overdue.