High jump

• 1. Introduction

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  The high jump asks one thing of an athlete: clear a horizontal bar, unaided, without knocking it down. The bar sits between two standards, with a crash mat below to catch the body that has just thrown itself backward over it. That backward leap, head first with the back to the bar, is called the Fosbury Flop, and today it is universally preferred. But it was not always so. For most of this event's history, athletes faced the bar, not away from it, and they landed not on foam but on sawdust and sand. So how did the standard way to jump end up looking like a person falling deliberately on their spine? Why did a single college athlete from Oregon State University rewrite the technique for the next century? And how does a bar a fraction over two metres become the line that separates Olympic champions from everyone else? The answers run from a Scottish field in the 19th century to a record set in 1993 that still stands.

• 2. The Rules Of Clearance

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  World Athletics governs the high jump through Technical Rules TR26 and TR27, once numbered Rules 181 and 182, back when the body was called the IAAF. Jumpers must take off from one foot, never two. A jump fails if the athlete dislodges the bar, or touches the ground or any object behind the bar before clearing it. Competitors may start jumping at any height the chief judge announces, and they may pass a height entirely if they choose. Three consecutive missed jumps, at any height or mix of heights, eliminate a jumper from contention. Victory belongs to whoever clears the greatest height in the final. When jumpers tie, the tie-breakers begin with the fewest misses at the height where the tie happened, then the fewest misses across the whole competition. If first place is still tied, a jump-off follows, starting at the next height above the jumpers' highest success. Each gets one attempt per height. If one succeeds, that jumper wins; if several do, the bar rises; if none does, it drops. This process decided the 2015 World Championship men's event and the 2024 Summer Olympics. A 2009 rule-change made the jump-off optional, letting tied athletes simply agree to share the place. That agreement produced shared gold in the 2020 Olympic men's event, held in 2021.

• 3. From Scissors To Roll

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  The first recorded high jump event took place in Scotland in the 19th century, where jumpers used a straight-on approach or a scissors technique. Approaching the bar diagonally, a jumper would throw the inside leg over first, then the other, in a scissoring motion. Around the turn of the 20th century, the Irish-American Michael Sweeney reshaped that scissors into the Eastern cut-off. By taking off as in the scissors method, then extending his spine and flattening over the bar, Sweeney raised the world record in 1895. The style proved durable. John Winter of Australia won gold at the 1948 London Olympics with it, and Iolanda Balaș of Romania used it to dominate women's high jump for about ten years until she retired in 1967. Another American, George Horine, found something more efficient still: the Western roll. Approaching on a diagonal, he took off from the inner leg while the outer leg drove upward, carrying his body sideways over the bar. Horine pushed the world standard higher in 1912, and his technique held sway through the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where Cornelius Johnson won the event.

• 4. The Straddle Era

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  American and Soviet jumpers ruled the next four decades, and together they pioneered the straddle. A straddle jumper took off as in the Western roll, then rotated the torso belly-down around the bar, the most efficient clearance the sport had yet seen. Charles Dumas became the first to clear seven feet, or 2.13 metres, in 1956. John Thomas of the United States pushed the world mark higher in 1960. Then Valeriy Brumel of the Soviet Union seized the event for four years, radically speeding up his approach run. He raised the record and won gold at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, before a motorcycle accident in 1965 ended his career. Brumel's success drew coaches across the world to learn from him. Frank Costello, a two-time NCAA champion from the University of Maryland, traveled to Russia to study under Brumel and his coaches, among them Vladimir Dyachkov. The straddle even outlasted the technique that would replace it. In 1977 the 18-year-old Soviet straddler Vladimir Yashchenko set a new world record, raising it again in 1978 before a knee injury ended his career at just twenty. Rosemarie Ackermann of East Germany, the first woman ever to clear two metres, held the women's record across the mid-1970s. She won gold at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the last Olympic high jump medal any straddler, man or woman, would ever take.

• 5. The Flop Arrives

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  Dick Fosbury jumped at Oregon State University, and he did something nobody coaching the straddle expected. Taking advantage of the raised, softer, artificially cushioned landing areas then coming into use, he revived the outmoded Eastern cut-off and twisted it into something new. He sent himself over the bar head and shoulders first, going over on his back, landing in a way that would likely have caused serious injury in the old ground-level pits of sawdust or sand. Around the same time, Debbie Brill arrived independently at the same idea, calling hers the Brill Bend. Fosbury won gold at the 1968 Mexico Olympics with his style, the Fosbury Flop, and its use spread fast. Soon floppers dominated international competition. The first to set a world record with the flop was the American Dwight Stones, who cleared a new mark in 1973. On the women's side, 16-year-old Ulrike Meyfarth of West Germany won gold at the 1972 Munich Olympics, tying the women's world record then held by the Austrian straddler Ilona Gusenbauer. A flopper did not break the women's record outright until 1978, when Sara Simeoni of Italy did it. The flop's reach was almost comic in its extremes. Franklin Jacobs of Paterson, New Jersey, standing 5 feet 8 inches, cleared 0.59 metres over his own head, a feat Stefan Holm of Sweden matched 27 years later.

• 6. Total Dominance

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  By 1980 the straddle was finished at the top. That year the Polish flopper Jacek Wszoła, the 1976 Olympic gold medalist, broke Yashchenko's world record. Two years earlier Sara Simeoni had broken Ackermann's record to become the first female flopper to hold it, and she went on to win gold at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, with Ackermann placing fourth. After that, the flop took over completely, and every other technique was nearly extinct from serious competition by the late 1980s. The names that followed Fosbury's lead reached across continents: the Chinese record-setters Ni-chi Chin and Zhu Jianhua, the Germans Gerd Wessig and Dietmar Mögenburg, the Swedish medalist and former world record holder Patrik Sjöberg. Two jumpers stand alone in modern records. Javier Sotomayor of Cuba set the men's world record in 1993, the longest-standing record in the history of the men's event. Yaroslava Mahuchikh of Ukraine set the women's world record in 2024. Among all high jumpers, only Stefka Kostadinova, Sotomayor and Mahuchikh have been Olympic Champion, World Champion and world record holder at once.

• 7. Anatomy Of A Flop

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  A Fosbury Flop begins with foot placement: the athlete starts to the right or left of the mat depending on the jump foot, keeping that foot farthest from the mat. The approach runs eight to ten steps, the first three to five in a straight line, the last five curving. That curve, the J approach, is what makes the flop work. It allows speed, the ability to turn in the air through centripetal force, and a takeoff position that converts horizontal momentum into vertical. The straight run builds momentum, the athlete pushing off with slow, powerful steps before accelerating into an upright posture. On the curve, the runner leans away from the mat from the ankles, not the hips, so the hips can rotate at takeoff and the center of gravity passes under the bar. Speed dictates length: a slower run needs about eight strides, a faster jumper perhaps thirteen, and great straddle jumpers ran at angles of about 30 to 40 degrees. The takeoff can use one arm or two. The plant foot, farthest from the bar, angles toward the opposite back corner of the mat while the knee of the non-takeoff leg drives upward. Unlike the straddle, where the takeoff spot stayed fixed, flop jumpers must move their takeoff slightly farther from the bar as it rises. Push too hard upward and the backs of the legs catch the bar as the body stalls. In flight, the driving knee turns the body so the back faces the bar, the shoulders drive toward the feet, and the athlete arches over, looking across one shoulder to time the kick that clears both feet and drops the body onto the mat. Even the curve's radius can be back-calculated from physics, deriving the required lean from the spin a jumper needs to clear shoulders going up and feet coming down.