Just intuition."It was simply a natural technique that evolved I developed it in competition There was no thought or design process I just began to change my technique one day. It was at a high school meet, the Rotary Invitation, in Grants Pass, Oregon, in the month of May 1963 I was 16. The experts said he would never succeed, that he would break his back. Instead, to the wonderment of the watching world, Fosbury broke the Olympic record, clearing 2.24m to snatch the gold medal by 2cm from his team-mate Ed Carruthers.The high-jumping fraternity stopped mocking Fosbury's Flop. They proceeded to adopt it instead, pushing the boundary of human levitation up to 2.45m, the world record height Javier Sotomayor set in Salamanca five years ago.
The sages said that Fosbury had been a genius all along, that he had used his knowledge as a student of physics and engineering to determine scientifically his pioneering technique. Fosbury laughed at the misconception that has become accepted fact down the years. He did so by literally turning his back on track and field convention. He did not high jump in traditional sideways style, using the straddle, scissors or western roll techniques. He pivoted 180 degrees on approaching the bar and launched over it backwards. An Oregon man originally, Fosbury settled in Ketchum 21 years ago He runs an engineering company in the former mining town.
It is with Mexico City, though, that he will always be identified.Fosbury was a 21-year-old student from Oregon State University when, in his first international competition, he won the Olympic high jump title in the Mexican capital. It just seems natural now when I watch the Olympic Games or the world championships on television and see everyone doing it I've had a long time to get used to it." Fosbury is 51 now. Divorced, he lives with his 16-year-old son, Erich, in Ketchum, the Idaho ski resort where the bells tolled for Ernest Hemingway in 1961. Hemingway spent the last year of his life in Ketchum and blew his brains out there. "His house is just down the road from mine, actually," Fosbury said. "It's funny," Fosbury said, taking a break from his morning workload on Thursday, "but when I came home from the Olympics a few of my friends said to me that I would go down in history I couldn't imagine what that meant But it has been amazing to see the revolution of the event It was the kids who created it They wanted to do the Fosbury Flop. When he struck gold in Mexico City 30 years ago on Tuesday the world outside the United States collegiate circuit beheld his unique high-jumping technique for the first time Since then Dick Fosbury's Flop has become the high jump.
In the three decades that have passed since the 1968 Olympic Games, the names of Bob Beamon, Tommie Smith, Lee Evans, Jim Hines and David Hemery have passed into history but Dick Fosbury's has never left the track and field arena. The High Court action is due to be heard on 11 January.Robertson is also representing Mirror Group Newspapers in the libel action brought by WPBSA when the Mirror claimed a cover-up in the disclosure of the results of an internal inquiry into allegedly excessive expense claims.. HE WAS the ultimate sporting flop He still is today. He is already representing Jim McKenzie, briefly the WPBSA chief executive, whose summary dismissal on 1 December provoked the civil war which has engulfed snooker to this day. Had I continued to pay my membership fees, I could not have been expelled without charge or trial.The banning letter was dated Wednesday 14 October but was handed to me only at 7pm on Friday when I arrived at the Guildhall. The timing made an immediate response through lawyers or other means at the end of a working week more difficult.Blake and the WPBSA's head of media relations, Brian Radford, had met with BBC TV earlier but it seems the BBC were reluctant to co-operate in any action which might be interpreted as a governing body exercising right of veto on a commentator for an event for which they had paid rights fees.The present WPBSA regime has not liked several critical articles in Snooker Scene, which I have edited for 27 years, although they have never claimed, let alone proved, a material inaccuracy in them.However, the In The Frame article about me contains extraordinary distortions, mostly difficult to summarise for those not involved in snooker minutiae but including an unfounded allegation that I leaked confidential information when I was briefly a WPBSA board member seven - yes, seven - years ago.I have instructed Rhory Robertson to issue a writ for libel on my behalf. Readers may remember the constitutional technicality whereby I was deprived of WPBSA playing and other membership rights: less than six months after honorary membership was conferred I was told that this was renewable annually by the board.
