Farewell to Dick Fosbury, a Man Who Truly Dented the Universe of Sport
We were all shocked to get the news that track legend and Olympian Dick Fosbury passed away on March 12, 2023. Dick spoke at our annual Dent conference in 2014, and since then we've had the great fortune to count him a member of the community and enjoy his company over dinner and at other social gatherings.
Dick figuratively – and literally – upended the world of track and field competition with his unconventional "Fosbury Flop" technique. Prior to the development of the “Flop”, high jumpers universally employed either the "scissor" or "straddle" technique to clear the bar. Dick's approach involved jumping over the bar headfirst and backwards, using a curved trajectory via a modified "Western roll". This oddball approach garnered negative feedback from competitors, teammates, and even his own coaches. Ultimately, Fosbury came to prominence using the Flop at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, where he won the gold medal and set a new Olympic record. Decades ago, Dick commented, “It wasn't until after the Olympic Games and the setting of a new record, every kid in the United States wanted to try that across the seas, all around the world.” Old-timers remember the world referred to his unusual approach as the "Fosbury Flop;" now it is simply called "the high jump."
When he spoke at our Sun Valley conference, Dick revealed that in high school, “I was the worst guy on the team, the worst guy in our conference. The worst guy in the state of Oregon.” After starting to jump using the Flop, “I improved a half a foot going from sitting on the bar, to laying out flat on my back, and that was the revolution. I finished tied for fourth place, and scored points for the team.” In college his coach tried to get him to go back to the scissor approach, but as Dick revealed to us, “I broke the school record by three inches with my technique and he gave up. He accepted. ‘Okay, Dick's doing something different.’”
Fosbury punctuated the ongoing struggle with self-doubt that many Olympians face, a theme that fellow gold medalist Brian Boitano also stressed on the Dent stage in 2018. As Dick said to our audience: “We're all faced with self-doubt. To me, I always felt that it's the black wedge that’s in the back of our brain that is telling us, you can't do this. You know this, you've never done it before. You're not good enough. And, and you're not gonna make it.” He said that to deal with this, he developed “a system of visualization and motivation.” This involved blocking out “all the distractions so that you stay focused.”
Dick mentioned his friend Marilyn King, who had hundreds of conversations with Olympians and concluded that Olympian thinking can be distilled down to three things: 1) Passion: your love for what you're pursuing; 2) Vision: the plan of execution and action; and 3) Being action-oriented: moving yourself one step closer to your goal each day. He said “If you do have passion, you're engaged fully, you love what you're doing, you will work on whatever you're doing no matter what barriers you have. You have to have a vision and a plan to reach your goals and look, look for the future for what you're trying to achieve. And then you have to act and execute.”
He will be missed.