During the 1968 Summer Olympics a little known athlete, Dick Fosbury, was preparing to begin his first attempt in the high jump.
Despite winning the U.S. Olympic trials two weeks earlier with a jump of 2.16 m (7' 1"), Fosbury was still not assured of his place on the team. Unbeknownst to the spectators in the Estadio Azteca, they were about to witness the revolutionization of the event.
Fosbury was barely known four years earlier as he struggled to get to grips with the event. The dominant techniques of the day, the Straddle and Western Roll were difficult to master and Fosbury was unable to match the jumps of his competitors using these techniques.
He decided to look into alternative ways of clearing the jumps to enable him to compete. It was during these moments of contemplation that Fosbury came up with his alternative method, which became known as the “Fosbury Flop.”
The premise of the high jump is simple. You have to jump over a bar and the athlete who clears the most height is the winner. During the 1960s, most of the landing mats were made of wood, sawdust and chips. This led athletes to trying to land on their feet, as to land on any other part of your body was not feasible.
However, during this time, Fosbury’s high school became one of the first to experiment with using a foam landing pit. This lessened the need to land on your feet and opened the way for Fosbury to develop his new technique.
Fosbury looked at this change and the current method of completing the event and wondered what would happen if he jumped over the bar backwards and landed on his back as opposed to on his feet?
Flopping Around
During his years at Medford High School, Fosbury struggled to compete in the high jump using the dominant techniques of the day. The straddle method, for example, was difficult to master as it required the jumper to clear the bar while facing down as well as lifting their legs over the bar individually.
Fosbury found it difficult to coordinate all the movements necessary to perfect the straddle method and began to look into other ways of doing the high jump.
This is what kickstarted Fosbury’ revolution and as he stated later it was borne out of necessity above all else:
“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’s new style was not popular initially. Newspapers condemned his style, with one stating that he looked like a “fish flopping in a boat”, while another newspaper described him as the “world’s laziest high-jumper.”
Despite all the criticisms levelled at his technique, Fosbury’s development of it began to pay dividends. He qualified for the Olympics by winning the national trials and despite some reservations about whether his technique would work at altitude in Mexico City, he was named on the American team for the high jump.
At the Olympics, Fosbury won gold with a jump of 2.24 meters (7 ft 4¼ in), which was an Olympic record at the time. Only two other athletes cleared 2.20 meters (7 ft 2½ in), underlining the effectiveness of his technique.
Within ten years, the Fosbury Flop would become the dominant technique in the high jump and to date, the majority of gold medals in the sport have been won using the technique.
Fosbury may have developed his technique as a way of levelling the playing the field for himself, but he unwittingly revolutionised the competition and his story has many important lessons that we can apply outside the world of professional sports.
There Is No One Way
Fosbury’s success in the high jump was a result of the norms of the event changing. The hard landing pits were phased out in favour of ones made of foam.
This reduced the need to adhere to the dominant techniques of the day such as the Straddle. However, despite the changes, many athletes stuck to what they knew instead of looking to take advantage of the new pit.
Old patterns of behaviour are hard to shake even when changes occur. The downfall of the camera company Kodak is a case in point. The company was a world leader in cameras and photographic film for many years before the turn of the Millenium.
Indeed, the company’s ubiquity was such that its tagline a “Kodak Moment” entered the public lexicon referring to a moment that should be recorded on a photo.
However, they were slow to adapt to disruptive changes in the photography world. Despite inventing digital cameras, they failed to realise their usefulness and neglected to invest in the digital sphere until it was too late. They overshot the market trying to match the performance of traditional film rather than embracing the simplicity of digital cameras.
Kodak did foresee one future development but failed to capitalise on it. They purchased the photo-sharing website Ofoto in 2001, but they used the platform to try and get people to print more digital images, instead of developing a site where users could upload images and network with others.
Instead of developing a mobile version of the site to coincide with the advent of cameraphones, Kodak sold the company to Shutterfly as part of its bankruptcy plan for $23.8 million in April 2012. The same month Facebook acquired a photo-sharing app for $1 billion.
The name of that app?
Instagram.
The key lesson here is that when an environment changes there are usually opportunities to come up with new and better ways to do things. If you don’t adapt to these changes, you may be left behind.
Environment is Everything
Why had no one come up with a technique similar to Fosbury’s before 1968? It is a good question and one which warrants an answer.
There are a few cases of people developing similar techniques to Fosbury, but for whatever reason, they were not the first to introduce it to the masses.
Bruce Quande developed a similar technique in 1963, while he was at Flathead High School in Kalispell, Montana. However, for reasons unknown, he did continue with the sport.
Another athlete by the name of Debbie Brill developed a similar technique in parallel to Fosbury’s known as the “Brill Bend.” She would go on to win two gold medals in the 1970 and 1982 Commonwealth Games.
The above points to the introduction of foam landing pits as the catalyst that inspired the introduction of the Fosbury Flop. Before their introduction, the environment in the sport was not conducive to the flop due to the hard landing surface.
Once that had been rectified, the flop became viable. The Fosbury Flop could not have been thought up before the introduction of foam landing pits because the flop required the introduction of those mats for a soft landing.
You may have a fantastic strategy, but if you develop it in the wrong environment it will not work. To be successful, your strategy must go hand in hand with the environment you are working in.
The Takeaway
Life rarely remains the same and change is the only constant in life. To ensure we have a safe landing when the inevitable change comes around, we must ensure that we are adaptable and open to it.
There is no one way to do things. There are always many different ways of doing things. What works for one person may not work for someone else. It pays to experiment with your approach to various tasks to try and find what works for you.
There are no rules in life, there are only beliefs. The majority of the high jump fraternity believed the best technique was the Straddle. Before the Fosbury Flop, there was also the Western Roll and the Scissors technique.
Three different techniques for one event only serves to highlight that there are always many different ways to skin a cat. It’s our beliefs that lead us to favour one over the other.
Changes in our environment are important to consider. What allowed you to succeed in high school, may not work so well at university. If there are roadworks on your usual route into work, you will have to find a different way to get to your job.
Life constantly throws up new challenges and circumstances for us to face. It’s not feasible to use the methods for every circumstance, this is a surefire way to fail at the first hurdle.
Things change all the time, the key is to be aware of these changes and experiment to see what works best.
Like Dick Fosbury, when the environment changes, you must change with it, or risk lagging behind everyone else.