On October 20, 1968, Dick Fosbury won the Olympic high jump in Mexico City with a clearance of 2.24 metres, going over the bar backwards and head first while every other finalist still used some version of the straddle or the western roll. He had reached the style by accident as a high school boy in Medford, Oregon, unable to manage the straddle and arching his back over the crossbar instead, helped by the fact that his school had just replaced its sawdust pit with foam rubber and he could land on his shoulders without harm.
Nobody expected him to win. Coaches called the method lazy and dangerous, and sportswriters had named it the Fosbury Flop at a point when it had not yet won anything of note. In the final he cleared every height at the first attempt. The style had a name. Ed Caruthers, the American record holder, took silver at 2.22 metres, and Fosbury's winning height set an Olympic record. He never held the world mark, which was Valeriy Brumel's 2.28 metres from 1963.
The technique took roughly a decade to sweep the sport. Foam made it safe. By the early 1980s nearly every finalist at a major championship was going over backwards and the straddle had disappeared from the top level entirely. The physics explained what the coaches had got wrong: going over head first allows the jumper's centre of mass to pass below the bar while the body clears it, which is why the bar heights kept rising once everyone had switched.
Fosbury carried on competing for a few years, worked as an engineer in Idaho, and later served as president of the World Olympians Association and ran a foundation for young athletes. He died in 2023 at seventy-six. Every high jumper who has cleared a world record since Brumel has done it his way.