Dick Fosbury, an Olympic gold medalist excessive jumper identified for revamping the technical self-discipline of the game, died Sunday, his publicist stated. He was 76.
Fosbury died after a recurrence of lymphoma, his publicist Ray Schulte stated.
The Oregon native was identified for introducing the “Fosbury Flop” to the world of excessive leap. Within the 1968 Olympics, he used the revolutionary transfer to win a gold medal over fellow America Ed Caruthers and the Soviet Union’s Valeriy Skvortsov.
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American excessive jumper Dick Fosbury clears the bar on his third try on the 1968 Summer season Video games in Mexico Metropolis. Fosbury received the gold medal with this leap, clearing 7 toes, 4 1/4 inches, which additionally set Olympic and American data. (Getty Photos)
By the subsequent Olympics, 28 of the 40 jumpers have been utilizing the approach. The 1976 Olympics turned the ultimate Video games the place an athlete would win with a method apart from the “Fosbury Flop.” Earlier than Fosbury’s transfer turned the norm, excessive jumpers cleared the bar by operating parallel to the bar, then utilizing a straddle kick to leap over earlier than touchdown with their faces pointed downward.
“The world legend might be used too typically,” Olympic legend Michael Johnson tweeted. “Dick Fosbury was a real LEGEND! He modified a whole occasion endlessly with a method that seemed loopy on the time however the outcome made it the usual.”
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FILE – Gold medal winner Dick Fosbury raises his arm on the victor’s podium of the Olympic stadium, Oct. 20, 1968, in Mexico Metropolis. (AP Photograph/File)
Fosbury began to dabble with the approach as a highschool athlete in Oregon. He took off at an angle, leaped backward, bent himself right into a “J” form to catapult himself over the bar and crash into the touchdown pit.
“I knew I needed to change my physique place, and that’s what began first the revolution, and over the subsequent two years, the evolution,” Fosbury instructed The Corvallis Gazette-Occasions in 2014. “Throughout my junior 12 months, I carried on with this new approach, and every meet I continued to evolve or change, however I used to be bettering. My outcomes have been getting higher.”
Fosbury’s approach was initially panned as he was described as a fish flopping in a ship. However he preferred the title “Fosbury Flop.”
“It’s poetic. It’s alliterative. It’s a battle,” he beforehand stated.
FILE – Dick Fosbury, of the US, clears the bar within the excessive leap competitors on the 1968 Mexico Metropolis Olympics. (AP Photograph/File)
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Fosbury was inducted into the Nationwide Observe and Discipline Corridor of Fame in 1981.
The Related Press contributed to this report.
