Flipping Over Flop
Fosbury says jump,
prep kids go high

By WAYNE COFFEY
Daily News Sports Writer

onrad Dalton of Fordham Prep is a long-limbed 16-year-old from Webster Avenue in the Bronx, and the best high-school high jumper in New York City. Five weeks after soaring 6-8 1 / 4 to capture the city title, Dalton is outfitted in a white bandana, gray sweatshirt and baggy black pants in the Armory late Friday afternoon, standing by the bar, alongside a spike-shoed revolutionary.

	Dick Fosbury passes on knowledge onto high school athletes.

Dalton had heard of Dick Fosbury and the famous Fosbury Flop before. He never imagined he'd meet him, let alone get pointers from him. Across the Armory track, the 6-4 Fosbury, still youthful and angular at 54, begins working with his Prep teammates, Kamar Adlam and Greg Garvey.

Dalton looks at Fosbury and shakes his head in wonder. This is like an apprentice electrician meeting Edison, a young pilot getting an audience with a Wright brother.

"I used to do research on the guy," Conrad Dalton says. "I can't believe I'm actually getting to jump with him. I can't even explain what it means."

Nearly four decades ago after he literally turned the high-jump world upside down, Fosbury is in town as a spokesman for Piaget, the French watch company, and to do an uptown clinic. He is wearing a blue running suit and long grayish brown hair, talking about the revolution he unwittingly wrought.

In mid-20th century sports, maybe only Pete Gogolak and his soccer-style field goal kicking can compare to Fosbury for the impact of a single, technical innovation.

Before Fosbury, the whole world essentially high-jumped straddle style, running straight at the bar, kicking one leg over it, then swinging up the other. After Fosbury, after he captured the Olympic gold in Mexico City with a jump of 7-4 1 /4 , the whole world was Fosbury Flopping — taking an angled, curving approach, turning backward upon takeoff and vaulting over the bar shoulders and head first.

"I intuited that there might be a couple of other high jumpers who might do this," says Fosbury, a civil engineer in Ketchum, Idaho, these days. "I didn't have a clue (it would take over the sport). I never realized its significance except through the years."

Walt Murphy is a recognized track and field authority, and the publisher of Eastern Track, a Queens-based publication. "When people first saw him doing his Flop, they said, 'This guy's nuts,'" Murphy says. "Then they saw what he was doing, and people began to take him seriously. The novelty became the reality."

Fosbury came upon the Flop quite by accident, during his sophomore year in high school in Medford, Ore. He was a gangly kid and a struggling high jumper, sick of bowing out of competitions at five feet, getting nowhere but frustrated jumping straddle style.

On a bus ride to a competition, he started thinking of other jumping techniques. He'd had some success jumping scissor style, splitting his legs and going over the bar basically sitting up. He got the idea of leading with his shoulder and laying back as he went over.

In one meet, his personal best went to 5-10 from 5-4. A week later, he went 5-10 again. A local paper ran a picture captioned, "Fosbury flops over the bar."

The name stuck, and so did the style, even though Berny Wagner, Fosbury's coach at Oregon State, remained utterly unconvinced, urging Fosbury to spend most of his time perfecting the straddle.

Fosbury dutifully straddled during practice, and Flopped during competition. When he Flopped his way over the bar at 6-7 to set the school record, Wagner gave in, though many others were still resisting it, including a prominent coach and a parade of doctors, who claimed that the Flop was a broken neck waiting to happen.

Fosbury cleared seven feet at an indoor meet in Oakland early in 1968, and jumped 7-3 in the Olympic trials. He kept going higher. Still, the track world didn't fully take notice until Mexico City, where the packed stadium was hushed for his final jumps, soaking in the spectacle of a style nobody could fathom.

When he took the gold, the extinction of the straddlers was almost inevitable. A couple of years later, a Californian high school jumper named Dwight Stones was flopping to a scholastic-record 7-1 1 / 4 .

"I'm sure glad Dick was an engineer and had such immediate success," Stones says. "He made my job easier. I only had to try and improve on what he did."

Laid-back and reticent, Fosbury gained immediate celebrity after the Games, a status he was not comfortable with. With no pro track circuit and no post-Olympic windfall coming, he struggled financially and flunked out of school, before gaining readmittance, and getting his engineering degree.

About 50 yards from where Fosbury is working with the Fordham Prep jumpers, a photo of his winning Olympic jump hangs in an exhibit of the National Track and Field Hall of Fame, of which Fosbury is a member. Conrad Dalton doesn't have time to admire it. His attention is on the bar, on going higher. Fosbury gives him some tips for his takeoff and his run up to the bar.

When the clinic is done, Dalton and his teammates all get autograph shots of another Olympic photo of Fosbury, flopping over the bar in front of three judges with fedoras and fat sideburns.

Dalton, also among the top 800-meter runners in the nation, had begun his day by leaving a gym bag with his track flats on a city bus. He likes the ending much better. He and Garvey and Adlam thank Fosbury, and then coach George Febles packs them in the van and drives back to Prep.

Early Friday night, Dalton brings the photo home to his Webster Avenue apartment, and puts it in the corner of his bedroom. He wants to go to Fosbury's high-jump camp in Idaho in the summer. He says he can't wait to apply what he has learned from the sports world's least likely revolutionary.

"I'm really happy I got to meet him," Dalton says.

Original Publication Date: 3/24/02