If
you’ve seen any track and field competition (probably not, but if you have)
chances are you noticed the vertical jumps, high jump and pole vault. They’re hard to miss and pretty exciting (but
then again, I am biased). While high
jump has been in the modern Olympic Games from the start, the original and
modern day high jumps are almost unrecognizable as the same event, with the exception
of jumping vertically off of one foot over a horizontal bar. What started off looking like hurdling began
to look more like Double Dutch, then like scissor kicking, then a roll, and
finally, like an incomplete back flip.
While there are some very clear rules and formal standards, there are very little restrictions to what high jumpers can do in the air, including jumping form. Yet if you’ve watched any competition or asked any coach within the past couple of decades about their high jump training, you’ll notice that everyone follows the same jumping form, the “Fosbury Flop”. This style was first introduced in 1963 on accident by Dick Fosbury, when he tried to maneuver his body anyway he could to get over the bar. He gradually remolded this “accident” into a 1968 Olympic high jump gold medal. In the world of high jump, the Fosbury Flop became a de facto like standard, a standard that arises “from common usage or market acceptance. Individual people or single firms often generate these standards, which spread either through the efforts of a sponsor or in a more organic way,” (Russell, Open Standards and the Digital Age). This standard spread all throughout the world of high jump without ever being mandated, and the reason it was so successful wasn’t realized until later. It’s all physics; by jumping backwards and arching your back, your center of mass is actually below the bar as you travel above it, which decreases the amount of force needed to clear the bar.
This de facto standard set high jump safety standards. The last part of the Fosbury Flop is the
lading, in which high jumpers land on their backs onto a mat. A padded mat is the standard today regardless
of level of competition. However, when
the Flop was first introduced, elite high jumpers landed onto padded mats while
most high school high jumpers landed onto a cushion of sawdust, which were
adequate for the techniques used during that time, but a recipe for countless injuries
with the introduction of the Fosbury Flop.
But while even Dick Fosbury himself developed non-degenerate backaches in
high school caused by two compressed vertebrae that was likely due to his new jumping
style, high school jumpers were spared of the injuries thanks to the standard
padded mats that were enforced.
Regardless of how revolutionary the
Fosbury Flop was, in high jump, like in any sport, technique can only go as far
as the body allows for. In the 1920s the
standard track and field body type was the same across all events, average height,
average build, and average weight. But
sports scientists and coaches realized that highly specialized body types for
the different events, instead of an average body type, would fare much better. This “artificial selection” shaped a standard
high jump body type, which for the most part is tall and mostly legs (i.e. long
legs and short torso) (with anomalies of course). For one, a shorter torso
correlates with a higher center of gravity when standing up right, and as you
might have realized from the physics earlier, it really about were your center
of gravity lies. So if your center of
gravity is already relatively high then you can put less effort into clearing
the bar than someone whose center of gravity is lower.
While high jump
may seem to some as a very basic event (jump high and clear the bar), there are many de jure-like and de facto-like standards that have evolved with the sport and shaped
the event and its athletes. The Fosbury
Flop is particularly interesting because it’s a standard that pretty quickly became
how most people define the high jump.
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2012/may/08/50-stunning-olympic-moments-dick-fosbury
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_epstein_are_athletes_really_getting_faster_better_stronger?language=en
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