A Different Way

I often hear stories from my clients about how other people (at first) thought their ideas were crazy and I think that's true also of many well-known people when they first came up with something new. 🙃

I think this little story illustrates what a tremendous effect you can make if you listen to your instincts and ignore what the naysayers tell you. 

Picture this:

A slender sandy-haired kid from Oregon pauses a moment as 80,000 people looked down at him from their seats in Mexico City's Olympic stadium.  

The fans at the 1968 Olympic Games didn’t know it at the time, but they were about to witness not only the setting of an Olympic record, but the complete revolution of an entire sport. 

Just a few years earlier, nobody in the sports world had even heard of this 21-year-old.  

As a long and lean teenager from Portland, he was just another kid interested in the high jump.  

He didn’t seem particularly gifted.  He had failed to clear the height required to participate in a high school track meet during his sophomore year.  

But then shortly after, he had a stroke of genius. 

The high jump is a rather simple event. Athletes jump over a bar and whoever jumps the highest wins. You must jump off of one foot but there are no other rules dictating how you choose to clear the bar. 

The dominant technique at the time was known as the straddle method.  It was a complex motion by which an athlete went over the high jump bar facing down, lifting their legs individually over the bar, and then landing on their feet.  

The boy found it difficult to coordinate all the motions involved in the straddle method.   

He began to experiment. ⚗️

Like every other school in the 1960s, the landing pit at the boy’s high school was made of wood chips and sawdust.  

Before his junior year, however, this high school became one of the first to install a foam landing pit. 

And that gave him a crazy idea. 

What if, instead of jumping the conventional way with your face toward the bar, you turned your body, arched your back, and went over the bar backwards while landing on your neck and shoulders?  

It looked crazy.  It was criticized at first.  😲

One local newspaper said that he looked like “a fish flopping in a boat” while another called him the “World's Laziest High Jumper” and ran a photo of him sliding over the bar backwards. 🐟

But not long after pausing before the crowd of 80,000 onlookers in Mexico City that monumental day, Dick Fosbury was the only one laughing as he used his unheard-of technique to not only set a new Olympic record by jumping 2.24 meters (7.35 feet), but also changed the entire philosophy of the sport.  🥇

Within 10 years his technique became the standard for high jumpers everywhere.  

Nearly every gold medal winner and major record holder ever since have used the “Fosbury Flop.” 😃