In 1963, a high school sophomore in Oregon started going over the high jump bar backwards, and the following year the local paper ran a photograph captioned “Fosbury Flops Over Bar.” He won gold with the technique at the 1968 Olympics; by 1972, 28 of the 40 men in the field were using it.

Picture two people clearing the same bar. The first runs at it straight on, throws a leg up and rolls face-down over the top, belly skimming the wood, like someone hauling themselves over a fence. The second sprints in on a curve, plants, and turns their back to the bar, arching over head and shoulders first, spine bent into a shallow arc, landing on the back of the neck.

For much of the twentieth century, the first way was how you jumped high. The second way probably looked like something had gone wrong.

But as we now know, the second way was the future. The person doing it was a teenager who couldn’t clear much of anything with the technique everyone else was using.

Why the old ways made sense

The methods that came before the flop were not silly. They were answers to a real problem.

Before deep foam, jumpers landed in pits of sawdust, wood chips, or sand, so you had to come down on your feet or your side or you got hurt. The scissors, where a jumper swings one leg over and then the other and lands upright, is the technique every gym-class kid discovers alone. Safe, and it wastes height. The straddle, the top technique of the 1950s and ’60s, was the smarter fix: run in, roll over the bar face-down, and keep your body as low and flat across the bar as you can.

What coaches were chasing was the center of mass, the single point that represents the average position of all your body’s weight. In a straddle, the jumper drapes over the bar with that point passing roughly across the top of it. The physics of each technique comes down to how it handles that point relative to the bar. The straddle was a good answer. It just wasn’t the best one, and nobody had seen the best one yet.

The equipment changed what a body could survive

The flop wasn’t a physics discovery first. It was an equipment story.

Through the 1960s, schools and universities began swapping their sawdust and wood-chip pits for deep beds of foam, and that is what made landing on your neck and shoulders something you could walk away from. As Olympics.com tells it, Dick Fosbury began working out his backward style in 1963, right around when those deep foam pits started arriving.

Fosbury, however, started before the good pits did, which tells you how uncomfortable the early version must have been. “When I jumped in high school,” he told Track & Field News, “so I would have to jump into sawdust pits. Landing on my neck and back so much compressed two vertebra in my back.” The wonder isn’t that the flop caught on. It’s that a teenager kept throwing himself backward onto sawdust long enough for the foam to catch up.

The trick was in the arch

When you bend your back into a deep arch over the bar, your center of mass can actually pass underneath the bar while your body clears above it. Your head goes over, then your hips, then your legs, one after another, and no single part of you is ever as high as the whole would need to be if you went over flat. That means less lift for the same height. As Scientific American puts it, the flop keeps the center of gravity low, and the lower it stays, the less energy the jump needs.

Fosbury put the advantage in plainer terms. He argued the flop was simpler than the straddle: “There are less moves near the bar and you expose only the width of your body rather than the length.” That’s a partisan read from the man who invented it, but it captures the whole idea. You present the narrow side of your body to the bar, not the long one.

It worked when it mattered. Fosbury cleared an Olympic-record 2.24m to win gold at the 1968 Mexico City Games, in front of a global television audience seeing the technique for the first time.

From one mocked teenager to most of the field

What happened next moved fast. Fosbury didn’t expect a stampede. He said he thought “one or two jumpers would start using it,” but never imagined it becoming the standard. He also noticed how strangely it spread. He said he was amazed that so many people picked up the style just from seeing it in pictures or on television, with no coach walking them through it.

The coaches, in fact, were part of the lag. Fosbury reckoned European coaches took a while to teach it because they had only seen still photos and couldn’t make sense of running around a curve. A photograph freezes the approach; it can’t show you the arc you run before you leave the ground. So the technique traveled faster among jumpers copying what they saw than among the people paid to instruct them.

Even so, the change came quick. By the 1972 Munich Olympics, 28 of the 40 men in the high-jump field were flopping. Four years, one Olympic cycle, from novelty to majority.

The detail we keep coming back to is the holdout. The Munich gold didn’t even go to a flopper. It went to Jüri Tarmak, a straddle jumper, winning as most of the field around him had already switched. The old technique could still claim a gold medal at the exact moment it was being replaced. That’s often how these turns look up close: not a clean break, but a better method slowly outnumbering the good one, while the last champion of the old way is still standing on the podium.

The arch, the curved run-up, the center of mass slipping under the bar, all of it was there for anyone to try in 1962. It took one sophomore on a sawdust pit, willing to look like he’d made a mistake, before the rest of the field could see it at all.