Dick Fosbury died Sunday. My father had been a high jumper; finished 11th at six foot five inches in 1950, at Eden Park Auckland, in the first Empire Games following World War Two, before the games were renamed the Commonwealth Games – the name my father always called it by. I have a false memory of us watching the 1968 Olympics with Fosbury revolutionizing the high-jump setting a new world record of seven foot four and a quarter inches. The memory is false because I was over 3000 miles away from home watching on 12 in black and white TV in the headmaster’s apartment as a special treat for the boys in the sixth form. I do have a clear memory of my father opining on the antics of Tommie Smith and John Carlos that polluted the pure amateur world of athletics.  But that came later, after we moved to America and usually in the commentary including Cassius Clay’s draft dodging. 

Dad was lazy, or always looking for a short cut. High jumping kept him on the athletic team but only required effort in short bursts with a languid run-up, then a quickening for two or three paces before the launch. There was some technical skill, more a tweak or a cheat, planting the foot in the shadow of the bar. In the competition rotation, there was sometimes even enough time to grab a smoke, especially when he was in the lead after the first jump. Everyone smoked. Even doctors, like he would become, endorsed cigarettes. When asked some years later after even the public accepted the causation between smoking and disease, he was fatalistic: only the unlucky got cancer. He never did. His wife, who never smoked, suffered the cancer meant for him, although she denied his smoking was the cause. Like him, it was just her bad luck and not correlation with her choices. 

The Fosbury Flop changed jumping. Dad had started with the scissor kick, a limiting form but safe when there was no true landing pit. He loved the Western Roll — as much for it’s name and origins in America, the country he secretly admired. At 23, he seemed too old to adapt to the new technique of the straddle, the jump weapon discovered to break the seven foot barrier. Or maybe, he couldn’t find the edge.

But the flop was urged on by shifting technology and rules changes. First, the development and adoption of foam crash pits that allowed landing on one’s back. Even Dick had fractured a vertebrae developing the jump, flattening into the hard sand. No longer did you need to land on your feet, as the scissor demanded when the crash pit was the same turf you took off from. Or the softer sand for the rolls that allowed a landing on all fours, like a cat rolling through the air to straighten and land. From the 1820’s when Scotland began the first record keeping to the longest standing record at eight feet set forty years ago this year, the high jump waits for a revolution in technique, a change to the rules, a new crash pit or some innovation that will make the past a curiosity.