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Comment by cromulent | Hacker News Reader

Dick Fosbury died last year. I love the story of him arriving at the Olympics, as a 21 year old, with his own technique that he has developed even as he was advised against it.

He was given a blue and a white pair of spikes by Adidas, and he wore one color on each foot.

He went on to win the gold medal, and his technique went on to dominate the sport.

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Apparently he started to develop his technique already at age 16, which is seriously impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Fosbury

My grandfather was a high jumper in the former Soviet Union, and he crossed 1.85 m in the 1950s using the "straddle technique": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straddle_technique

Looking for the specialist terms in English, I found a paper with a bunch of geeky figures to compare the different techniques :) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-mechanics-of-the-c...

Similarly[^1], Pete Gogolok transformed NFL placekicking:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Gogolak

https://time.com/6590292/super-bowl-field-goal-kick-history-...

Other examples of a single athlete transforming a sport?

[^1]: Gogolak didn't invent a new kicking technique—he kicked like he knew from soccer. But he was the first to kick this way in the NFL. So I realize it's not quite the same as Fosbury.

skateboarding is full of this stuff, its a bit different since there's usually no objective measurement like height, but take the Ollie and the Kickflip for example.

Julius Erving, Dr J, in basketball brought a revolution in style, I guess based on leaping ability and some center of mass awareness that made him seem to float or walk in the air. I'm not sure if he was the first from a general trend (on playgrounds, say) or if others adopted his style, but it really changed the game. Wilt, Russell, Kareem, and or Larry Bird had phenomenal abilities, but it wasn't something anybody could copy.

The technique was only possible because of better pits. Landing on your neck in a pit of sand and sawdust isn’t advisable. A foam rubber cushion makes a huge difference.

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