The first Olympic Games were held in Greece in 1896 and have been held every four years since
except in 1916 1940 and 1944 due to a few pesky World Wars while athletes have gotten stronger
and faster in those 120 years the core of most events haven't really changed the winner of
the 1896 400 meter race American Herbert Jamison finished in 50 4.2 seconds a hundred twenty years
later in Rio Wade van niekirk from South Africa won in 43 seconds in those 120 years Olympians
managed to shave 20% off their times but they were still running around an oval track using mostly
the same running technique humans had been using for millennia ever since they first stood on two
feet but one Olympic event that has seen a total transformation and how it's done is the high jump
the high jump was one of the 43 events from those original Olympics back in 1896 for nearly the
first hundred years of the event runners took one of a few styles to clear the barbed the straddle
the Western role the eastern cut or this scissor jump
but in 1968 at the Mexico City Olympic Games 21 year old orgo nian dick Fosbury would make
history when he jumped seven feet four and a quarter inches above the ground the first
American to win gold in the event in over a decade but Fosbury wouldn't become famous for his gold
winning jump in fact it was so six inches below the world record at the time but fosberg would
become famous for his unique style that would come to be known as the Fosbury flop where a
runner turned away from the pole jumped and arched her back over the pole headfirst Fosbury style
would become legendary and would revolutionize the event at the next Olympic Games four years
later the new Fosbury flop had already become the most commonly used technique among the 40
competing Olympians and of the 44 Olympic gold medalists to compete in the high jump from 1972
through 2016 42 used the flop including all the new world record setters today it remains the
most popular technique in modern high jumping but how does the Fosbury flop actually work and
what's the physics behind this game-changing move it lies in the center-of-mass for every
object we can locate the average position of all its mass by taking into account how the mass is
spread out around the object for instance the center of mass of a sphere is right where you
would expect at the center point we humans also have a center of mass when most people stand up
their center of mass is around their stomach but what happens to your center of mass when you lift
your hands in the air and maybe even wave them around like you just don't care well your center
of mass moves upwards and when you bend forward your center of mass moves below your stomach in
a place where there's no mass at all and this is the trick that the Fosbury flop takes advantage
of the jumper runs in a curved path allowing them to turn their back to the pole right as they jump
diverting their horizontal velocity to a vertical velocity and as the jumper arches their back their
center of mass bands below the bar with the old free fosberg techniques the jumper had to apply
enough force to lift their center of mass above the bar by at least a few inches in order to clear
the fosberg flopper didn't have to do that with it the jumper can apply the same amount of force
we clear a bar much higher since you don't need to bring your whole body above the bar at the
same time this also means they can raise the bar so high that even if you can't raise your
center of mass any further like by having a more powerful jump you can learn to arch your back more
effectively to clear an even higher hurdle with this the Fosbury flop might be the high
jumping world's greatest leap forward by being a leap backwards if you like getting smarter with
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