Ekow Nelson
A little bit of history came to an end today – for track and field aficionados like yours truly anyway. The American athlete, Dick Fosbury passed.
If you have ever wondered why high jumpers at the Olympics and other international athletics events jump with their back first, here is where it all started – at the extraordinary record-breaking Mexico Olympics of 1968.
As Athletics Weekly correctly recalled, “ for the first 72 years at the Olympic Games, athletes jumped forwards in the high jump. Then, at Mexico 1968, Dick Fosbury came along …and changed the sport forever”.
For years since the high jump was first introduced in the 19th century, athletes scaled the horizontal bar facing forward, using what was known as the scissors technique. They attempted to lift one leg over the bar and dragged the other across from behind. Then came the straddle technique which involved thrusting the body forward first in a parabolic dive with the trailing legs straddling the bar. The highest any athlete could jump with any of these forward-first techniques was 7ft or 2.1m, which Bob Avant of the United States achieved in 1961.
By literally turning around conventional wisdom, Dick Fosbury revolutionised the high jump forever with his ‘back-first’ technique at the Mexico games, and broke the 7ft barrier. Every winner of the event at subsequent Olympics since 1968 has relied on this technique. An example of how unconventional thinking and daring to challenge the status quo, can lead to positive, long-term results.
The Mexico Olympics in 1968 were the first to use the now common all-weather tartan tracks for track and field events and the first games to be broadcast to an international audience in colour. East and West Germany competed as separate teams for the first time.
Jim Hines became the first human to officially run the 100m in under 10 seconds and set a new world record of 9.95 seconds in Mexico. He later anchored the US 4x100m relay team to another world record at the Games.
Tommie Smith ran the 200m dash in under 20secs, 19.83 secs to be exact, for the first time in history. And went on to raise the famous, defiant Black Power salute on the podium with John Carlos.
The World Triple Jump record was broken five times by three athletes in that Olympics and all five top finishers in the final beat the previous world record.
Although Africans featured in the Rome and Tokyo Games prior, it was in Mexico that African athletes came into their own especially in the long distance events. Kip Keino of Kenya won gold in the 1500m and silver in the 10,000m race, despite suffering from severe bouts of abdominal pain.
Mexico cast a long shadow on athletics for years. Lee Evans’s 400m record set at the Games – the first under 44 seconds – stood for almost two decades and I was lucky to witness – albeit in a live TV broadcast – when Butch Reynolds broke it in 1988. The sensation from seeing Bob Beamon’s long jump record broken after 23 years, was somewhat wistful but enjoyable, nonetheless. It remains the second longest jump after Mike Powell’s, which itself has stood for 31 years.
And it was not just in track and field. The 16 year old American high school student, Debbie Meyer, became the first swimmer (long before Michael Phelps) to win three individual gold medals in the 200m, 400m and 800m freestyle events in Mexico.
Mexico 1968 gave the world extraordinary moments of athletics brilliance, one of the largest hauls of world records and long-lasting legacies like Dick Fosbury’s. There are very few people after whom a sporting technique will forever be named.
May he rest in peace !
Cairo, March 2023
reimagining 