Athletics is a relentless test of human limits, and it often requires innovation and out-of-the-box thinking to realize the true physical potential of the human body. In some Olympic events, athletes have improved performance through sheer talent and hard work. In others, experimentation and changes in techniques and rules have come to their aid.
With the Olympics set to begin in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, tomorrow, here are some cases in point:
High jump: the flop that was a hit
Today, the Fosbury Flop is synonymous with high jump, and an athlete using any other technique in international competitions is met with surprise. Before Fosbury became a high-jump technique of choice among athletes, it was simply the last name of Dick Fosbury, a tall, gangly athlete from the US’ Oregon State University. He won gold at the 1968 Olympics, held in Mexico City, setting a new record at a height of 2.24m.
Before the Flop, the prevalent techniques in the high-jump event were the Straddle and Scissors. Describing the Flop when Fosbury first executed it wasn’t easy for sports journalists. Reporting his Olympic performance, the Los Angeles Times wrote that “he goes over the bar like a guy being pushed out of a 30-storey window”.
Weightlifting: hip thrust
The prevalence of traditional resistance exercises and weightlifting has made people assume that professional weightlifting is as simple, that technique, coaching and training aren’t necessary for the two Olympic lifts: snatch and clean and jerk. The neuromuscular complexity of this sport is unparalleled, for it puts immense strain on the body. Until the late 1960s, weightlifters were not allowed to touch the bar with any body part other than their hands unless it was in the overhead lockout position in the snatch lift, and resting on the shoulders in the clean lift. It was only after the International Weightlifting Federation changed the rules that weightlifters started employing the hip and torso thrust technique to improve performance while lifting the weights. This, in turn, led to the modern double-knee-bend technique in the 1970s that we still see today.
Shot put: glide and spin
Shot put has been a keenly contested Olympic event since the first modern Olympics took place in 1896 in Greece. It originated from Scottish highland games, where the Scots followed the Celtic tradition of putting a stone to decide the strongest man. Before the rotating and glide techniques, the chief movements involved standing with the shot, crouching and then putting the shot from that position. The event winner in the 1896 Olympics, Robert Garrett (US), recorded a throw of 11.22m. Today, the world record, held by Randy Barnes (US), stands at 23.12m.
The glide technique, popularized by American shot-putter Parry O’ Brien, evolved in 1951. Widely considered the crucial turning point in the sport, the glide later led to the spin rotational technique, which caught the world’s attention when Russian shot-putter Aleksandr Baryshnikov crossed the 22m mark using the spin technique in the 1976 Games, setting a new world record. Both the glide and spin techniques are prevalent today.
How breaststroke led to butterfly
Although the breaststroke is the slowest of the four swimming techniques, it’s also one of the hardest to learn, along with the butterfly stroke, which requires precise coordination between hand and leg movements. Interestingly, the butterfly stroke originated in efforts to optimize breaststroke swimming. It first emerged partially in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, where many swimmers swung their arms in a butterfly technique (moving the arms above the water) with the breaststroke kick. It was only in 1952 that the butterfly stroke was accepted as a different style, with separate rules and regulations.
Techniques that were disallowed
Safety is always a concern for authorities and administrators alike, and that often means disallowing techniques that might prove to be dangerous if executed incorrectly. The world was initially hesitant to adopt the Fosbury Flop for precisely this reason—while professional athletes landed on well-cushioned mats after their jump, the high-jump equipment set up in most schools had sawdust or a pit of sand instead of a mat. The public’s fear that children would break their necks attempting the Flop proved to be unfounded, for nothing of that nature took place in high jumps anywhere.
However, there are two instances in which the International Association of Athletics Federation (Iaaf), the governing body for track and field events, chose to intervene and declare a technique too dangerous.
Long jump: front somersault
Long jump is one of the most watched track and field events at the Olympics, primarily because of the visual drama and cut-throat competition. After the athlete launches off the board, there are three major flight techniques used: the hang, the sail and the hitch-kick. The chief goal of all three techniques is to combat the forward rotational momentum that’s experienced from take-off. The forward somersault had the potential to produce longer jumps because no power is lost countering the forward momentum, and it also reduced wind resistance in the air.
A few athletes used the front somersault in the 1970s. American athlete John Delamere used it at the 1974 National Collegiate Athletic Association Championship—he succeeded in matching the jump of the then long-jump Olympic champion Randy Williams, who recorded an impressive 8.34m. Iaaf declared it illegal in the mid-1970s, adding a rule that the jumper’s feet can’t go above his head.
Javelin: the Spanish inquisition
Javelin is the only throwing event in the Olympics in which the technique is explicitly stated in Iaaf rules; no unorthodox techniques are permitted. This wasn’t the case in 1956, when Spaniard Félix Erausquin created his own javelin-throwing technique, one in which he would spin in a motion resembling the shot-put spin technique before using the added rotational momentum to launch the javelin. With his “Spanish style”, Erausquin managed to throw as far as 112m. But Iaaf banned the technique it considered dangerous ahead of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.
The current Olympic record for javelin throw stands at 104m, executed by German Uwe Hohn in 1984—he is the only person to have thrown the javelin further than 100m. In April 1986, the Iaaf technical committee took the decision to redesign the men’s javelin, making it less aerodynamic, and the nib more blunt, to ensure that the javelin doesn’t cross the track or injure anyone in the audience. Since then, the javelin hasn’t been thrown further than 100m at the Olympics.
