What A Jump Can Teach The World
How does an historical moment of the Olympics relate to success?
The athlete portrayed in the previous picture is performing a high jump. Noticed something unusual? You are thinking that his jumping technique is somewhat awkward, and probably the majority of us will agree with this. The reason why it’s funny to look at and even seems like a technique adopted by incompetent people — that way of jumping was very popular and the most used by the majority of professional high jumpers.
If you’d be asked to perform a high jump in the gym, you would use a much different approach; something more common these days and, again, most of us will too. Everyone will try to do the following steps: sprint diagonally towards the bar, then curve and leap backwards over the bar. And the result, if captured, should look like this.
This seems more normal and usual, right? Nowadays it is. But in the past, professionals would consider this awkward and unusual. Reporters also shared this opinion and wrote that athletes looked like “a fish flopping in a boat”. Not to mention that
“World’s Laziest High Jumper”
was the, not so kind, title used to describe the man who was trying to develop and improve that technique during the 1960s. Those words sound very funny if you consider that, today, that exact technique is broadly accepted and is commonly known as the Fosburry Flop.
Richard Douglas Fosburry, also known as Dick Fosburry, was attending high school and wasn’t a super talented athlete considering that, using the dominant high jumping techniques of the period — straddle method (forward facing jump, first picture) — he had difficulty to complete jumps of 5 feet (1.5 m), the qualifying height for many high school track meets.
Kind of a loser? Absolutely not.
Instead of getting overwhelmed from failure and delusion he opted for a better attitude. At age 16, he began to experiment with his own technique, iterated on it, changed it and gradually improved it so that he could perform better. He’s technique was very different, as we saw in the previous pictures, therefore, Fosbury’s coaches encouraged him to continue with the traditional methods of jumping. As he improved with his own method and then set a new record for his high school, he gradually dropped the usual jumping techniques.
Some years later, at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Fosbury took the gold medal and set a new Olympic record at 2.24 meters (7 ft 4¼ in), showcasing the potential of the new technique.
The Fosbury Flop out-performed every other method and it has been the standard in modern high jumping for decades.
I like sport anecdotes. Not because of the sport itself but the message that is hidden in them.
Attitude
Fosbury is an Olympic medalist and one of the most influential and inspirational athletes in the history of track and field.
Clearly, everything on his path to success would have brought him to failure.
At the beginning, he couldn’t perform great, even the minimum qualifying levels were difficult to achieve. He quietly could have quitted as many have done. Instead, he chose to step back from that situation and have a broader look at his problem. He came up with an idea and tried it over and over again, changed it many times, till he could see in his solution a positive result: jump higher.
Even with his solution, he had to face another problem: coaches, experienced people who should guide and help shaping the athlete’s career. With Fosbury, things were different. Unintentionally they slowed down and tried to stop Fosbury’s improvement by forcing him practicing the usual method that never worked for him. Had he listened to them, he probably wouldn’t be an Olympic medalist neither influential and inspirational.
Find Your Flop
In conclusion, this story should teach you that achievements occur only if you follow a strength attitude to constantly improve and out-perform yourself, day after day. If you’re right, as Fosbury was performing better, you shouldn’t let anybody stop you from pursuing your goals even if “coaches” are telling you to.
Most importantly, take always a step back from your situation and take a look at the bigger picture.
