Dick Fosbury, the Fosbury Flop and four other techniques that revolutionised sport

Dick Fosbury, who passed away on 12 March, was a true sporting pioneer. With the development of a new technique that came to be known as the ‘Fosbury Flop’ the American high jumper turned his sport completely on its head.

When Fosbury introduced his new technique, jumping backwards off the “wrong foot” and arching his body over the bar, during his gold-medal-winning campaign at Mexico City 1968, he started a revolution in his sport.

By Munich 1972, 28 of the 40 high jump competitors had adopted the Fosbury Flop, and the last time the previously ubiquitous straddle jump technique was used at an Olympics was Seoul 1988.

Fosbury was quite literally a game-changer.

While it’s difficult to think of any other single athlete who made such a lasting impact on the way one sport is practised, there are others whose innovations have created “before” and “after” moments that have forever changed their disciplines.

Here are five pioneering techniques that revolutionised sport.

• Dick Fosbury dies at age 76

The Fosbury Flop: The technique that changed high jump forever

Prior to Mexico City 1968, the straddle jump had been the dominant high jump technique at the Olympics. It involved an athlete jumping face forward and twisting their body mid-air to navigate their way over the bar.

But a young American named Dick Fosbury was readying himself to change the sport forever.

Fosbury was not a naturally talented high jumper - at least not when he deployed the straddle jump. He had even failed to make it onto his local athletics club's high jump team as a schoolboy athlete.

But in 1963, he began developing a new technique that involved a backwards jump that enabled athletes to use the natural arch of their backs to propel themselves over the high jump bar.

At Mexico City 1968 - up against what Track and Field News called “the toughest field ever assembled” - Fosbury introduced his new technique to the world, equalling the Olympic record en route to gold.

Nowadays, the ‘Fosbury Flop’ - as the technique came to be known - is the only type of jump employed by athletes at the Olympics. And it is all thanks to the innovation of Fosbury some 60 years ago.

The Axel: The gold standard of figure skating jumps

While today’s figure skating fans are used to seeing triple variants of the Axel and even witnessed Ilian Malinin land the first Quadruple Axel in competition at the 2022 CS U.S. Classic, the Axel remains the oldest, most famous and arguably hardest jump in ice skating history.

The jump, which is the easiest to identify due to its unique forward take-off aspect, is named after its inventor, Axel Paulsen, a Norwegian skater who first performed it in competition in Vienna in 1882.

Over the years, the Axel has continued to evolve, with the USA’s Dick Button (1948 Winter Olympics) and Carol Heiss (1953) becoming the first male and female skaters to land a Double Axel in competition. Vern Taylor at the 1978 World Championships in Ottowa and Ito Midori (1988 NHK Trophy), were the first to land Triple Axels in competition prior to Malinin’s historic Quad just last year.

Despite these iterations, the Axel remains mythical in the sport and a staple of any serious skater, with a Double or Triple Axel required to be performed in the short program and free skating segments of all International Skating Union events.

The Yurchenko: The vault that changed gymnastics

It’s hard to quantify the impact Natalia Yurchenko’s new vaulting technique had on the world of artistic gymnastics after the Soviet introduced the eponymous skill to a competition in Moscow in 1982.

The vault involves a round-off onto the springboard followed by a back handspring onto the platform, with the gymnast pushing off the top to complete somersaults of varying difficulties – from double saltos to triple twists. The pioneering aspect resulted from the backward entry, which created more power compared to the previous most popular vault, the Tsukahara, which required a forward entry.

Both men and women compete the skill, with the double twist the most common vault competed at international level. The difficulty is increasing though.

In 2021, at the U.S. Classic in Indianapolis, gymnastics legend Simone Biles became the first woman to compete the Yurchenko double pike, a vault that few men compete due to its additional layer of difficulty - and danger - of flipping twice in a pike position before landing on your feet.

Biles, a four-time Olympic gold medallist, performed the vault to great acclaim but none of this would have been possible without the brilliance and bravery of Yurchenko, whose vaulting invention took her sport to a whole other level.

Earvin N’Gapeth and the fake volleyball spike that bamboozled the opposition

While the famous ‘spike’ technique first appeared in volleyball at the beginning of the 20th century in the Philippines, a more recent innovation from France’s Earvin N’Gapeth has often left opposing teams grasping at air: The fake spike.

After leaping into the air and looking for all the world as if he’s about to hit the ball from the three-metre line, N’Gapeth instead transforms himself into a setter, passing the ball to a free teammate while the block is doomed as the opposing player has already jumped.

The technique has been a game-changer in volleyball, as opposition defences have no idea whether to defend an oncoming spike or turn their attention to teammates waiting in the wings to receive a pass.

While it is believed by many that N'Gapeth invented the technique and first deployed it with his club side Modena in 2017, he has certainly been the player who has perfected the ruse, with the Tokyo 2020 Olympic champion’s ability to hide his audacious intentions in way that is difficult - if not impossible - to read.

Rodney Mullen’s kickflip: A revolution in skateboarding

The kickflip trick is a staple of skateboarding that often separates the budding amateur from seasoned veterans. And while a version of the kickflip (at least in name) existed before Rodney Mullen introduced it to the world, it paled into significance next to the game-changing trick the legendary American created.

Mullen’s kickflip, which involves flicking the skateboard into the air so that it turns 360 degrees before the skater lands back onto its surface, was so mesmerising at the time that it was originally named ‘the magic flip’ as other skaters just couldn’t work out what was going on.

In fact, rather than being a well-rehearsed invention of Mullen’s, the skater had first performed the trick completely by accident. “I just pushed the board away from me and it was just like it was mocking me, it flipped and landed on its wheels,” he told The Berrics skateboard website in an interview about the initial time he landed a kickflip.

From that serendipitous moment, he went about perfecting a technique that has now become synonymous with the sport of skateboarding, and will no doubt feature when the sport makes its second appearance at an Olympic Games at Paris 2024.

Over the years there have been many other new techniques that have revolutionised sport, as pioneering athletes innovate new ways to push their discipline forwards.

More examples include the Panenka penalty in football (invented by Czech footballer Antonín Panenka), the two-handed backhand in tennis (said to have been created by Italy’s Giuseppe "Beppe" Merlo), echelons in cycling and the ‘rip entry’ in diving.

But perhaps none of them can come close to the impact Fosbury had when he turned the rules of his sport back to front with the Fosbury Flop at Mexico City 1968.