Think about it. You sight a bar, run towards in and then turn and try and launch yourself over it while looking away from the bar. The bar hurts when you fall on it and if not that you cannot see what you are landing on.

When everyone else is jumping the bar from the front, you must be a big crazy to do what Dick Fosbury did.

Using the orthodox scissor-kick, he cleared 1.60. Whilst still a school-child he invented the famed “Fosbury Flop” and reached 2.05m before jumping an incredible 2.24m at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. The Fosbury Flop flew in the face of the scissorkick, the Western roll, the Eastern cutoff and other techniques.

Vladimir Yashchenko the last King of the Straddle

The Fosbury Flop is long regarded as one of the biggest shifts in technique in any sport.