The American Olympic champion Richard Dick Fosbury, who changed the sport of high jump forever, died on Monday, at the age of 76, and invented a technique known by his name used by all competitors in this sport, without exception.
His agent, Ray Schulte, announced the news on Facebook Instagram“It is with a very heavy heart that I have to share the news that my longtime friend and client Dick Fosbury died peacefully in his sleep early Sunday morning… “.
He continued, “Friends and fans all over the world will miss Dick very much. He is a true legend and a friend to all.”
reported Guardian It was in the report announcing his death that Fosbury said in a 2012 interview that he struggled with the fame that came with him after his Olympic victory.
For him, his fame was too much, especially since he was from a small town in Oregon in the far west of America, and the result of his success came more than he expected. At first, he was happy with the fame, but later wanted it to stop, according to the Guardian.
The slender American student, Richard “Dick” Fosbury, overturned the high jump scales, his known equations, and his approved techniques, so he crossed the bar, rising on his back, while the rest of the competitors were jumping backwards (in front), and he recorded a new record of 2.24 m during the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games. To mark a new shift in sports development, according to a previous report by AFP.
And this new technology would have remained a miserable experience had its owner not reached his goal: victory, according to the report, and the height of 2.24 m was enough to enter the Fosbury jump in history to remain in it.
And the fact is that Fosbury, the son of English immigrants, would not have achieved what he achieved without his stubbornness. During his training at the university, he rejected the prevalent front jump in the whole world, and insisted on jumping in a scissor way.
At the age of nineteen, he regularly exceeded two meters in height, and yet his coach did not care much about him, and he did not believe that he could turn him into a hero, according to the French Agency.
Fosbury finished fifth in the American Universities Championship in 1967, achieving 2.10m, then he qualified for the Mexico Olympics with a jump of 2.21m, which made him one of the strong candidates to win the gold medal.
In the Olympic Games, which was his first trip outside the United States, Fosbury achieved 2.24 meters, four centimeters away from the world record of Soviet Valery Brommel, and then surpassed the Olympic record. And only then, was everyone convinced that Fosbury was a great hero project, according to an AFP report.
It is strange that Fosbury did not view sports except as a hobby and a means of entertainment.
And the hero who created a new technology that bears his name remained while he was struggling to overcome a bout of depression that afflicted him, and he returned to settle in Idaho with his wife and their son, to work as a road and bridge engineer.
And he missed the opportunity to return and participate in the 1972 Munich tournament, so his sports career ended, but his jump remained alive forever, knowing that with his humility he says that if he had not invented the back jump, someone else would certainly have done so, according to AFP.
In Mexico, Yuri Dyachkov, the innovator of the scissor jumping method, which was adopted for years by the best coaches in the world, was a witness to the revolutionary Fosbury leap, and he took many pictures with his camera of his movements, expressing his surprise and admiration at the same time.
At first, Dyachkov considered the new style remarkable and pleasing to the eye and the spectator. However, he added, “But it is a personal style in the first place, and I do not think that it will affect the future of this game.” However, his belief was wrong.
Immediately upon his return to Moscow, Dyachkov devoted himself to studying the new phenomenon, but the most important thing is that this leap gave the United States a title that it had not lost since 1956 (…) Fosbury quickly had imitators, according to AFP, who are all practitioners of this beautiful sport, without exception.
