One newspaper called him the World’s Laziest High Jumper. Another one said he looked like a fish flopping in a boat. And four years later, that fish stood on the podium in Mexico City with a gold medal around his neck.

Before he was a fish, Dick Fosbury was a sophomore in Medford, Oregon, who couldn’t clear five feet. His coach wanted him to straddle the bar and roll over it face down, the way serious jumpers did. Fosbury’s body wouldn’t cooperate. So at a meet in Grants Pass he tried something else. He took off from his outside foot, turned his back to the bar, and went over head first, staring at the sky. He cleared five feet ten, six inches above his best.

The grown-ups hated it. His college coach made him practice the old style. Doctors worried he’d break his neck. One Olympic coach warned that kids copy champions, and he didn’t want them copying this.