The Fosbury Flop: On analytics and strategic surprise

One of the limitations of sports analytics is that they easily capture what is measurable, but often exclude what is not. A scout vising Medford High School in early 1963 in search for the next high-jump prodigy would have understandably ignored the tall, clumsy underachiever who went by the name of Dick Fosbury. Fosbury was not a top athlete, and high jump was not his best discipline. He did not excel in his execution of the dominant high-jump technique of the time, the straddle method. In fact, he struggled to meet the qualifying height for several high school competitions.

Even if a current scout, one who uses today’s technology and who has access to complex physiological data and detailed performance analytics, were to go back in time to Medford High — the judgment would not have changed. Fosbury did not have what it would take to be competitive at high jumps. At least not if he were to perform the same routine that everybody else did. Barring divine intervention, the only way he could win would be with some extra advantage over the rest of the field.

To predict the success of the athlete who would transform the high jump and influence track and field more than any other individual, a scout would have needed to measure tenacity, audacity, determination and creative thinking. The scout would also need to identify the very existence of gaps in the current techniques that dominated the sport, gaps that would give the opportunity for an innovator to benefit from exclusive mastery of a novel technique.

Faced with his poor performance in the high jump, teenager Dick Fosbury started experimenting with alternatives to the straddle method. Over several years he gradually evolved the technique that became known as the Fosbury flop. Significantly, it was not a one-off flash of genius, but an ongoing process of incremental improvement with plenty of trial and error that produced the revolutionary technique. Some external circumstances also helped. The landing surfaces of high jumps were being improved at the time allowing jumpers to land on their backs, and facilitating the shift to facing away from the bar during the jump.

This is not the place to describe the evolution of the Fosbury flop. The technique turned out indeed to be superior to other techniques. The way the jumpers roll over the bar allows them to clear heights above their maximum centre of mass. But Fosbury could not possibly have known that when he started working on his high jumps. What he did know was that he was doing better with his own modified technique than when he was attempting the current techniques as he kept on tinkering away and improving the technique.

The teenager needed to negotiate with and persuade coaches to allow him to use his own jump. However, it was only in his second year in college where relying on his own technique he broke the school record after clearing 2.08 meters, that he finally could abandon the other techniques and focus exclusively on his new method, which he continued to modify and improve.

Fosbury exploded onto the international athletics scene in 1968. After narrowly making it onto the US Olympic team for the Mexico City games, Fosbury won Olympic gold and set a new Olympic record at 2.24 m, dazzling the audiences with his counterintuitive technique. Following his sensational victory the technique gained quick acceptance and came to dominate international competitions.

But Fosbury would never repeat his victory. As our hypothetical scout form 1963 would have accurately predicted, Fosbury was simply not on par with top jumpers. Others, with better physiological and athletic capacities, would use the technique to set new world records.

So what are the lessons we can draw from the Fosbury flop?

One is that analytics can be pretty accurate, but do not necessarily tell the full story. Based on his actual performance, analytics would have accurately established that, everything else being equal, Fosbury would never be a top jumper. But everything else is never quite equal.

There are important lessons here for underdogs in particular, and competitors in general. If you can’t win within the existing rules and patterns of the game, you must change and adapt the rules to your needs, or alternatively, find inefficiencies and gaps within the system. Fosbury was able to execute a strategic surprise by exploiting an inefficiency and using a different, superior technique. And to do so required a whole lot more than technical analysis. It required a lot of work with little promise of reward and a rare level of commitment and tenacity.

But like every other strategic or tactical surprise, the advantage that a disruptive technique confers does not last long. Once it is no longer an exclusive possession of the underdog, the magic dissipates. Once the superior jumpers learned the technique, Fosbury was no longer competitive.

But he did not need to be. He had already made history and reshaped the high jump as we know it, probably having a more lasting influence than any other athlete in the 20^th century.