EDITOR’S NOTE: The Heart, Humor & Hope column usually posts on Thursdays but we moved up the run date on this one to honor the subject.
Mexico City brought Fosbury worldwide fame but I contend it was amid the pines of Echo Summit, above Lake Tahoe, where he reached deepest—just to make the U.S. Olympic team.
Those who have finished by making all others think with them have usually been those who began by daring to think for themselves.
—C.C. Coltron
DICK FOSBURY, the Olympic high-jumper, died a year ago today. He was 76.
Fosbury beat the odds many times in his high-jumping years: despite flunking out of Oregon State and losing his student deferment, he narrowly avoided being drafted and having to go to Vietnam.
Despite being in the best shape of his life, he nearly drowned in Lake Tahoe two months before the 1968 Olympic Games, saved by teammate John Radetich.
Despite being assured he’d made the Olympic team after winning his event at a June 1968 trial in Los Angeles, he had to “re-prove” himself in a second trial—at elevation—when the U.S. Olympic Committee changed its team-qualifying standards in the middle of the stream.
And in his coup de grâce, despite being one of the worst prep high jumpers in the state of Oregon—and despite Oregon State Coach Berny Wagner trying to de-program him from the backward-over-the-bar style he’d invented as a Medford High sophomore—Fosbury not only won a gold medal in the 1968 Olympics, but revolutionized high-jumping in the process.
Essentially every high-jumper today uses the Fosbury Flop style he invented as a gawky 16-year-old.
Alas, despite beating all these odds, Dick found something he couldn’t overcome: lymphoma.
It’s the full-of-life people whose deaths sting us so badly. And yet Fosbury’s legacy is unique, rich and multi-faceted, rooted in the almost obsolete idea that nice guys don’t have to finish last. Sometimes they beat everyone else on the planet, re-enroll in school to earn a degree, become a civil engineer, invest in the lives of young athletes across the country through track camps and become president of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Association.