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0:00.0 | Hi I'm Dave Ice, founder of StoryCorps. This message comes from NPR sponsor Subaru, the largest corporate |
0:06.1 | supporter of Adopt a Classroom.org by providing teachers with funding for supplies and resources. |
0:11.8 | Subaru, more than a car company. |
0:16.0 | Back in the late 1960s, Dick Fosbury was a tall gangly 21 year old college student. He had tried to play football in high school, |
0:24.8 | but he was told he wasn't strong enough. He tried to play basketball, but the coaches said he |
0:29.7 | wasn't athletic enough. Finally though, Dick found his sport, the high jump and he got so |
0:35.9 | good at it he made it to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. And there Dick debuted |
0:42.1 | something the world had never seen before. |
0:45.0 | You had this new way of jumping. |
0:47.0 | The Fosbury Flosbury Flopf. |
0:49.0 | It was way different. |
0:51.0 | Yeah. |
0:52.0 | That's Dick Fosbury with his Olympic teammate Ronaldo Brown. |
0:55.1 | Back then there were a lot of ways to jump over the bar. |
0:57.6 | But Dick, who was studying engineering, applied his scientific brain and came up with something so counterintuitive |
1:04.8 | that it almost didn't make sense. |
1:06.6 | He went over the bar backwards. |
1:09.0 | He jumped, twist his body in midair, sail over the bar, and land on his back with a flop. The move was so successful. That's what everybody does today. |
1:20.0 | But there, in that stadium in 1968. It looked ridiculous. |
1:25.0 | As I warmed up, the crowd started to notice. You know, there's this strange guy. |
1:32.0 | And as we started the competition they kept raising the |
1:36.8 | bar jumping higher and higher more people started to watch and I remember the |
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