50 stunning Olympic moments No28: Dick Fosbury introduces 'the flop' | Sport | The Guardian 50 stunning Olympic moments 50 stunning Olympic moments No28: Dick Fosbury introduces 'the flop' His revolutionary technique struck gold in Mexico 1968 but four years later Dick Fosbury failed to qualify for the Munich games Dick Fosbury leaps to glory in the 1968 Olympics. Photograph: Bettmann/CORBIS Tuesday 8 May 2012 03.59 EDT First published on Tuesday 8 May 2012 03.59 EDT Share on Messenger Close Dick Fosbury’s route into high jump was fairly straightforward: he liked sport, and wasn’t any good at anything else. He hadn’t got into the football team, and despite being one of the tallest kids in school had been no more successful at basketball. He tried athletics and, having had a go at a few disciplines, found this was the one at which he was least useless. But Fosbury still spent many years towards the wrong end of the usefulness scale.

He likes to tell a story to illustrate just how average he was before he perfected the technique that was to astonish the world and make his name famous: in the mid-60s, while he was at college. “Someone bet me I couldn’t clear a stuffed leather chair,” he says. “Not only did I lose the bet, I also broke my hand in the crash landing.” Why Olympians shine under the spotlight Read more At the time there were two common methods of clearing a bar: the scissors jump, where the athlete threw first one leg and then the other over the bar before landing on his feet, as modelled here by 1920 gold-medallist Richmond Landon, and the straddle, and its variant the western roll, which saw the athlete fling himself over the bar face down, as demonstrated by 1964 winner Valeriy Brumel . The scissors jump had been considered a bit old-hat since the end of the 19th century, when the straddle started to take over.

Though the technique had changed a bit over time, there had been no significant alterations since 1936, when the IAAF first decided that athletes didn’t have to clear the bar leg first. “As a young boy our teacher taught us both the western roll and the scissors style,” Fosbury told me when we discussed his breakthrough in 2008. “I felt more comfortable with the scissors style and used that reasonably well until I reached high school, at the age of 16, when my new coach explained to me the limitations of that style. He and I worked to try to teach me the western roll, but with very little success.” That is to put it mildly. Fosbury’s best effort using the western roll was a mere 5ft 4in (1.63m), more than 60cm (23.5in) short of the world record at the time and a height that wouldn’t have impressed anyone even in the first half of the 19th century. Given that by the time he stopped growing he stood 6ft 4in tall without jumping at all, there was only one logical conclusion: he was a hopeless high-jumper. But he was also persistent.

“In 1963, I asked the coach if I could return back to the scissors style, and he didn’t encourage me, but he let me make the decision,” Fosbury told me. “In the very next meet, as I was attempting a new personal best, I felt I had to do something different to clear the bar and I tried lifting my hips, which caused my shoulders to go back, and I succeeded. I made a new height, I tried again, and successively I was able to clear six inches higher than my previous best, and that change made me competitive, it kept me in the game, and I converted from sitting on the bar to laying flat on my back.” In a sport where improvements are normally measured in fractions of inches, any technique that allowed an athlete to improve his personal best by half a foot in a single afternoon clearly merited serious investigation. Over the next two years, Fosbury honed what was to become known as the Fosbury Flop.

“I guess it did look kind of weird at first,” he said, “but it felt so natural that, like all good ideas, you just wonder why no one had thought of it before me.” (A couple of people have claimed that they did, most notably the Canadian future world No1 Debbie Brill, who was developing the “Brill Bend” at around the same time, and was videoed using the technique in 1966 . “I was quite shocked when I saw Fosbury jump the first time,” she said. “I thought I was the only one doing it.”) By 1965 he had become a successful student athlete and his style given its name, first used on a photograph caption in his hometown newspaper, the Medford Mail-Tribune. “Intuitively I liked the contradiction: a flop that could be a success,” he told me. “It was descriptive, it was alliterative, and it fit.” But still nobody took him seriously. “Everybody just thought, ‘It’s pretty funny and everything, but he’ll never do anything,’” he recalled. He had done well enough to earn a partial scholarship to Oregon State University, where he continued to work on the western roll with his coach, Berny Wagner.

Fosbury contends that this was because Wagner thought he would never achieve anything with the flop. “He and I differ on this story,” recalls Wagner, who insists it was the athlete’s idea. “He told me he wanted to be a good jumper and he was tired of being laughed at. I said, ‘Well, we’ll work you on the straddle.’” But Wagner was no fan of the flop, which he considered “a shortcut to mediocrity” until, one day in the summer of 1966, he decided to capture the flop on video for posterity. He set the bar at 6ft 6in, and filmed Fosbury sailing over it. Reviewing the footage, he saw that his pupil had cleared the bar by a good six inches. “That,” he said, “was when I first thought he was going to be a high jumper.” But still Fosbury continued to fail to set the world alight: a year before the 1968 Olympics he had risen to a world ranking of 61. Even by the time of the Olympic trials, held a month before the Games began, he was not considered a likely medallist.

He was the final qualifier in the event, snatching third place by a whisker. The Guardian’s John Rodda, covering the trials, was not convinced of his potential and described him as “the curiosity of the team”. The greatest problem Fosbury posed to those covering the sport was how they should describe his technique. The Los Angeles Times wrote that he “goes over the bar like a guy being pushed out of a 30-storey window”. Sports Illustrated said that “he charges up from slightly to the left of centre with a gait that may call to mind a two-legged camel” and that having flung himself over the bar back first “he extends himself like a slightly apprehensive man lying back on a chaise longue that’s too short for him”. The athlete himself, meanwhile, described it as follows: “I take off on my right, or outside, foot. Then I turn my back to the bar, arch my back over the bar and then kick my legs out to clear the bar.” If it was hard to describe, it seemed equally difficult to emulate. The New York Times reported that no other student at Oregon State had managed it, despite two years of trying.

“Sometimes I see movies,” Fosbury said, “and I really wonder how I do it.” He arrived in Mexico an unknown, having never competed outside his homeland, and did not spend his time there with the myopic focus of a likely champion. Instead he hung out with the javelin thrower Gary Stenlund, who had brought his campervan down from America. On the night before the opening ceremony they drove to the Aztec pyramids at Teotihuacan with a couple of swimmers from the 1964 Games, Cynthia Goyette and Donna De Varona. “We stayed out there all night,” Fosbury said. “People were cooking soup over campfires and yelling, ‘Hey, Gringo! Come have some soup!’ We shared their food and drank beer and crashed out in the van or slept in the pyramids—I don’t really remember. The next morning, we got caught in this incredible traffic jam and missed the opening ceremony. But that night at the pyramids, I’ll always remember it. It was wonderful.” Much of the next fortnight passed in similar fashion.

In all the time between his arrival and his competition Fosbury practised jumping only once, and even that session was curtailed by a rainstorm. This wasn’t so unusual: he found little benefit from jumping in private, having discovered that only the rigours of competition, the heady cocktail of pressure and adrenaline, could truly motivate him. He would need all the motivation he could get: the men’s high jump final in Mexico was gruelling even for the audience, lasting more than four hours. It was decided that the competition should start at 2m, a measly 6ft 6in. Every time the bar was raised a committee of five men in blazers and hats spent several minutes measuring everything, and they had done it three times before Yugoslavia’s Miodrag Todosijevic became the first man to be eliminated on the day’s 42nd jump. By then the 80,000-strong crowd had noticed the guy with the funny action. At first they laughed, and then they started to cheer. “Psychologically, I was extremely benefitted by the actions of the crowd, who began to notice me,” Fosbury told me.

“I felt their focus, and I was able to channel that attention into a high level of intensity, raising but trying to control my level of excitement.” Fosbury was in his element. By the time he sailed over the bar at 2.18m, his fourth successive first-time success, only two other people – his fellow American Ed Caruthers, and the Soviet Valentin Gavrilov – were still in the competition. He had a medal. All three cleared 2.20m at the first attempt, but when Gavrilov failed at 2.22m Fosbury was sure of at least a silver. He still had not missed a jump, giving him a massive advantage over Caruthers, who had failed five times. The bar was set at 2.24m, 7ft 4in, an Olympic record height. The crowd were so engrossed at this point that when Ethiopia’s Mamo Wolde, the first marathon runner, arrived in the stadium he was barely noticed. Fosbury and Caruthers both failed twice; the former knew that if Caruthers failed with his third, or if he succeeded with his own, gold was surely his.

It wasn’t just its execution which set Fosbury’s jump apart from his rivals’: his run-up was longer, his preparations lengthier. He stood, readying himself for his final attempt, rocking from his heels to his toes, clenching and unclenching his fists, eyes focused on the floor, for every second of the two minutes he was allowed. And then he bounced towards his target, launched himself into the air and sailed over. Caruthers failed again. It was all over. Two days of unremitting attention later Fosbury climbed back into Stenlund’s campervan and set off for Mexico’s mountains. “I had a horrible time dealing with all the attention, really,” he said. “It was too much. I was a small-town kid who did something way beyond what I had ever expected to do. I like the attention, but I wanted it to be over at a point. It didn’t work that way.” His innovation was not immediately embraced, partly because of safety concerns. Fosbury himself had been warned to stop jumping at 16 when a backache was traced to two compressed vertebrae, in all likelihood a jumping-related injury.

A second doctor told him that the injury was unlikely to get any worse and he might as well keep going. The issue was that, while at the top level athletes jumped into deep padded mattresses, in high schools falls were often cushioned by little more than a pile of sawdust. “Kids imitate champions,” Payton Jordan, the US Olympic coach, said in Mexico. “If they try to imitate Fosbury he will wipe out an entire generation of high jumpers, because they will all have broken necks.” This anticipated chiropractic epidemic, of course, never happened. Ten to watch: meet Team GB's sporting superheroes Read more Soon after Fosbury returned to the United States he went on the Johnny Carson show, with Bill Cosby – once an aspiring high-jumper himself – and Raquel Welch. He was asked to demonstrate his technique, but he slipped on the shiny studio floor and fell over. It was pretty much the last anyone saw of the Fosbury Flop being performed by its inventor, who drifted away from athletics and failed with a last-ditch attempt to qualify for the Munich Olympics in 1972. “I was mentally exhausted,” he said. “There was too much attention.

People put me on a pedestal and kept me there. I didn’t want to be on a pedestal. I received my medal and I wanted to be back on the ground with everyone else.” But generations of athletes since have guaranteed that his name lives on. Juri Tarmak may have straddled his way to gold in 1972, but since then no one has won a high jump medal of any colour using any technique other than the Fosbury Flop. “It was a moment that changed my life,” Fosbury has said. “It brought me gifts, not necessarily monetary. I have met presidents and kings, seen the world and shared my life with wonderful people.” Watching footage of the 1968 final , what is striking is this: to anyone watching at the time, Fosbury’s technique would have seemed totally bizarre. To anyone watching now, it is everyone else who looks weird. Of course, it might all have been so different – and arguably quite a lot more entertaining.

If the IAAF had only permitted high-jumpers to take off using two feet rather than one, a diminutive 20-year-old acrobat called Dick Browning would have smashed the world record in 1954 and his favoured method – a lengthy gymnastic tumble culminating in an epic backwards somersault – might even now dominate the sport. Browning Bounce , anyone? 50 stunning Olympic moments No50: Usain Bolt stuns the world Usain Bolt's 100m and 200m golds in Beijing launched a remarkable career and rescued sprinting from controversy<p>In 1980 <a href="">Allan Wells’s gold</a> was cheapened by the absence of the Americans, who had boycotted the Moscow Olympics. <a href="">Carl Lewis, champion in 1984</a>, failed a drug test at the US Olympic trials four years later.

<a href="">Ben Johnson won what became known as The Dirtiest Race in History in 1988</a> only to test positive for the steroid stanozolol immediately afterwards.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Usain Bolt promises not to leave it late against Justin Gatlin in Rio</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Why Olympians shine under the spotlight</a> </p><p>This time he remembered to do his shoelaces up. This time he ran hard all the way to the finish, looking neither to right nor left, and left out the extravagant look-at-me gestures. And this time he beat the most intimidating record in men’s sprinting, one that those who were in Atlanta on an August night 12 years ago thought might stand for a lifetime.<br>Perhaps Usain Bolt had taken the criticisms to heart.

Or perhaps, when he arrived in Beijing for the Games that will forever define his career, he was taking Michael Johnson’s great 200m record more seriously than he needed to take his first target, his own 100m mark, set three months ago.<br>When he ran 9.72sec back in May, bettering Justin Gatlin’s record by two hundredths of a second, he must have known that, on the right night and in the right conditions, he could go much faster. What happened in the Bird’s Nest on Saturday night would have come as no surprise to him.<br>Confronting Johnson’s epic achievement was another matter, however. The 200m is his distance, the one at which, aged 15, he became the youngest ever world junior champion.

Earlier this year he managed to talk his coach, Glen Mills, into letting him run the 100m because he fancied it, but Mills has always thought that he is built for the longer distance – and even for the 400m, if only he were willing to do the work and endure the pain it would entail.<br>Considering that he has still to run the 100m a dozen times in competition, which makes him hardly even a novice, the results have been pretty respectable. The way in which he ran 9.69 the other night has made a record that traditionally comes down in hundredths look like a soft target. For him, at least.

But when Johnson, on that electrifying Georgia night in 1996, settled into his unique shoulders-back style and persuaded his legs to whirr to a record of 19.32 for the 200m, a mark was established that might as well have been sealed in a lead casket and buried in an unmarked tomb.<br>Everyone knew Johnson was good, but amazement was the only possible reaction to an achievement that represented as much of a paradigm shift as Bob Beamon’s 8.90m leap in Mexico City in 1968. Forget the late Florence Griffith Joyner and her tainted 100m and 200m records, which have stained the record books for the past 20 years and may last another 20. The fact that no one ever found it necessary to cast aspersions on what Johnson did is what made Bolt’s mission last night a matter of such high seriousness.<br>Yes, he did a little dancehall steppin’ in his lane before stripping off his tracksuit, and he repeated the now-famous archery mime before pointing again at the word “Jamaica” on his chest.

But once he was down in the starting blocks, the concentration was total.<br>In his first appearances on the international scene it was often said that, at 6ft 5in, he had trouble with his starts because he needed to arrange his gangling limbs before hitting anything like a smooth stride. That has been emphatically disproved in Beijing, where his getaways have been things of near-perfection. At 0.182sec his reaction time last night was only the fifth fastest of the eight finalists, but within three or four strides he had begun to rip past the men on either side of him. When he came out of the bend, the contest was already over.<br>Once again he moved majestically into the distance, leaving the rest looking as though they were in a separate race. And now, inevitably, came the moment that had been so eagerly anticipated when we would see whether or not he intended make Saturday night’s ebullient but premature celebrations a permanent feature of his performances.<br>The truth of it was there to be seen in the last dozen strides. Once more there was clear water, five metres of it, between Bolt and his nearest pursuer.

But this time everything spoke of effort ratcheted up to the maximum. There was a grimace on his face, his fists were bunched tight, and he even dipped in the textbook manner as he crossed the line, striving to squeeze out the last hundredth of a second. And, by two hundredths, the record was his, along with the gold medal.<br>So now he becomes the ninth man in Olympic history to claim the 100m-200m double, following Archie Hahn (1904), Ralph Craig (1912), Percy Williams (1928), Eddie Tolan (1932), Jesse Owens (1936), Bobby Morrow (1956), Valeri Borzov (1972) and Carl Lewis (1984): six Americans, one Canadian, one citizen of the Soviet Union – and, now, a Jamaican.

None of his predecessors, however, broke both world records in the process, and those times of 9.69 and 19.30 are the unassailable facts supporting the argument of anyone wishing to acclaim Usain Bolt, who turns 22 today, as the greatest sprinter of all time.<br>He will need to be around for a while longer, adding to his collection of medals and records, before the award of such a status is universally recognised. Over the past four days, however, under the world’s gaze on the biggest stage available to any athlete, he has made his case.<br>Perhaps it is too much to hope that he has also banished the suspicions that have undermined the integrity of Olympic sprinting for so long. But when you look at him, at his 6ft 5in, 13st 8lb frame and at the articulation of his limbs as he devours the track, you might be forgiven for believing that he, more than any leading sprinter for several generations, might just be able to achieve such feats without artificial assistance. There is none of the sense of physical distortion created by the excess muscle that powered recent generations out of the blocks. He looks balanced and natural.

Well, we can hope.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Usain Bolt 50 stunning Olympic moments No44: Carl Lewis's four golds in 1984 | Simon Burnton <p>His medal haul is unrivalled in track and field but the unloved American struggled to turn his success into big bucks</p><p>Carl Lewis was to compete in the ambitious quadruple of 100m, 200m, long jump and 4x100m, but it was not just athletics that he practised in the build-up to the 1984 Olympics. With an eye on his life beyond the Games there were also acting lessons – “How can you train 15 years towards becoming the best athlete in your event and not one minute towards becoming an actor or singer and expect to do well?” – and an internship with the Houston television station KTRK, where he spent three days a week preparing for a possible career in front of the camera. “I am not limited to being an athlete,” he said.

“I am limitless.”</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Why US women are likely to outperform the men again at the Olympics</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Why Olympians shine under the spotlight</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Olympic Games 2012 50 stunning Olympic moments No 41: Emil Zatopek the triple-gold winner Winning the 5,000m, the 10,000m and the marathon in 1952, Emil Zatopek became a sporting legend. His remarkable personality and a gruelling training regime led to his success<p>In 1952 Jim Peters, the British marathon champion, world record-holder and pre-race favourite, was on the track at the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki, warming up for perhaps the most important race of his life, when he was approached by a wiry, balding man whom he had never previously met. The man thrust out a hand. “Hello,” he said.

“I am Zatopek.”</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Mo Farah victorious as he warns Olympic rivals: ‘I’ve never felt better’</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">41-year-old Bernard Lagat headed for fifth Olympics after winning 5,000m</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Olympic Games 2012 50 stunning Olympic moments No39: Allan Wells wins 100m gold in Moscow | Rob Bagchi Hard work in an unheated garage turned the Scottish sprinter into a champion when he defied the Olympic boycott request<p>At the beginning of the documentary chronicling his Olympic year, Allan Wells, the Commonwealth 200m champion, utters the resonant phrase that provided Mike Alexander’s compelling film, No Easy Way, with its title.

In the winter of 1979, and over footage of the sweat-drenched sprinter wringing out his singlet after a relentless workout involving briskly pummelling a speedball, a gruelling sequence of sit-ups and all manner of plyometric conditioning exercises in a bare brick and obviously chilly Edinburgh garage, Wells sums up his ethos: “There’s no easy way. They say ‘dedication’ but I don’t think that word absolutely covers it.

I think it’s madness, just about.”</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Olympic facts: 10 things you didn't know about the 100m sprint</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Great Britain to send ‘best-prepared athletics team’ to Rio Olympics</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Athletics 50 stunning Olympic moments No38: Don Thompson takes walking gold | Simon Burton <p>Briton won the 50km walk gold medal at the 1960 Olympics by acclimatising for Rome’s heat in a tiny, steam-filled bathroom<br>• <a href="">Thompson walking to gold – in pictures</a></p><p>As is so often the case, Don Thompson discovered his calling by accident. He was 18, and for two years had been a member of Thames Valley Harriers, running cross-country and road races with moderate success. But in March 1951 he injured an achilles in a relay race and for some time found himself unable to fully extend his legs.

Wanting to keep up his fitness, one weekend he entered a five-mile walk and won with ease.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">A painful walk to equality: 'I’ve always loved doing long distances'</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Why Olympians shine under the spotlight</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Olympics 2012: athletics 50 stunning Olympic moments No36: Linford Christie wins gold in 1992 | Rob Bagchi The Great Britain team captain went one better than his silver at Seoul 1988 when at the age of 32 he became the oldest person to capture 100m Olympic gold and only the third Briton<p>The two pitfalls confronting considerations of Linford Christie’s victory in the 100m at the Barcelona Games in 1992 are cynicism and naivety.

How much more straightforward the assignment would be were it not for Christie’s positive test for nandrolone in 1999 and subsequent two-year ban from athletics?</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Ten to watch: meet Team GB's sporting superheroes</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Great Britain to send ‘best-prepared athletics team’ to Rio Olympics</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Athletics 50 stunning Olympic moments No35: Wilma Rudolph's triple gold in 1960 | Rob Bagchi <p>The American overcame polio to bring home a bronze from Melbourne aged 16 before dominating the sprints four years later to show ‘the potential for greatness lives within us all’<br>• <a href="">In pictures: Wilma Rudolph makes history in 1960</a></p><p>When the founding father of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, said that the paradigm of the movement he revived was “exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, mind and will” he could not have foreseen

 the emergence at the Melbourne Games in 1956 of a 16-year-old schoolgirl who embodied his ideals so perfectly.

A bronze medal in the women’s 4x100 metres relay, while admirable enough, is not an orthodox symbol of track and field greatness. For a teenager at her first Olympics it speaks as much of promise as achievement.

But for Wilma Rudolph, who had been given extended leave from her junior year studies at Burt High School in Clarksville, Tennessee, to fly 9,200 miles to compete, if that medal had remained the zenith of her career it would still have represented one of the most remarkable exploits in the rich history of athletic endeavour, even if it would not have been given much exposure beyond her home state.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Why US women are likely to outperform the men again at the Olympics</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Kendra Harrison sets 100m hurdles world record at Anniversary Games</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Olympic Games 2012 50 stunning Olympic moments No34: Kelly Holmes doubles up in Athens | Rob Bagchi Injury and illness had repeatedly knocked the middle-distance runner off course before major championships but <a href="" title="">it all finally came together</a> during <a href="" title="">six glorious days at the 2004 Olympics</a><p>One measure of the scale of Kelly Holmes’s accomplishments over six days

 in Athens at the end of August 2004 can be found in the most arcane place in her autobiography.

Look up “health” in the index and you find seven subsections and 30 entries. Allergies, anaemia, asthma and back problems each receive only a couple of references. She is more expansive on the Epstein Barr virus which ruined her 2001 season and the havoc that chronic fatigue brought in its wake.

Excruciating stomach pain and the ovarian surgery and epidural injections that finally alleviated it take up eight candid pages but the inventory devoted to injuries dwarf even the catalogue of physical obstacles preceding it.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Kelly Holmes: I was deprived of gold medals by drug cheats</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Great Britain to send ‘best-prepared athletics team’ to Rio Olympics</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Kelly Holmes 50 stunning Olympic moments No33: Ben Johnson wins gold … tests positive | Simon Burnton Six of the eight 100m finalists at Seoul 1988 have been implicated in doping at some point in their careers, the Jamaica-born Canadian the first of them<br /><a href="" title="">• In pictures: the men's 100m in Seoul</a><p>Ben Johnson was famous for the power of his start, Carl Lewis for the pace of his finish.

It was the American’s speed over the last 50m that had allowed him to beat Johnson in eight of their first nine meetings, between 1980 and 1985, repeatedly overhauling the Canadian in the closing stages. But in 1986 that had started to change, and by the time they raced in Rome at the 1987 world championships, Johnson had won five of their preceding six races.

At the Stadio Olimpico, Johnson had reacted to the starter’s pistol in the scarcely credible time of 0.129sec; no longer with an advantage over the second half of the race Carl Lewis, who took 0.193, was beaten before he took his first step.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and the drama of the Dirtiest Race in History</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Ben Johnson: 'My revelations will shock the world'</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Ben Johnson 50 stunning Olympic moments No31: Paavo Nurmi wins 5,000m in 1924 | Simon Burnton In feat after astonishing feat at the 1924 Olympics, Nurmi won without apparent exertion. What made this reclusive character keep going for gold when others weren't even standing?<p>Some Olympians are born to run fast, others simply force themselves.

Paavo Nurmi was one of the latter, a man of such iron will and fierce discipline that nobody hoping to survive on talent alone could dream of coming near him. In 1958, when he looked back over his athletic career, he said that the one thing it had taught him was that there are “neither unbeatable records nor human limits”. And in his world, at least, it was true.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Mo Farah victorious as he warns Olympic rivals: ‘I’ve never felt better’</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">41-year-old Bernard Lagat headed for fifth Olympics after winning 5,000m</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Olympic Games 2012 50 stunning Olympic moments No30: Zola Budd in 1984 | Simon Burnton <p>The barefoot 5,000m runner was given the chance to compete in Los Angeles, but a dream opportunity turned to disaster.

<a href="">See images from the race here</a><br>• <a href="">Budd says she gave up in Olympic final after tangle with Decker</a></p><p>The story of Zola Budd’s involvement in the 1984 Olympics is the tale of three races, each extraordinary in their own way, held in the space of six months.

Two of them took place on a running track, the third around the corridors and meeting rooms of Downing Street, Whitehall and Fleet Street.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Ten to watch: meet Team GB's sporting superheroes</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Why US women are likely to outperform the men again at the Olympics</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Athletics 50 stunning Olympic moments No29: Michael Johnson's 200m gold in 1996 | Barney Ronay Johnson made history and became the only man to win both the Olympic 400m and 200m – and his 19.32sec run in the latter was a performance of generational greatness<br />• <a href="">View images of Johnson's incredible sprint double in 1996</a><p>One of the great things about top-level sport is its stubborn and unyielding singularity.

Even in an age of widescreen mass-consumption, moments of sporting greatness tend to retain their distinct texture and tone, a quality of individual character that sails above the groping televisual superlatives and escapes through the cracks of the sponsorial glaze.

So it is with great sprinters: experts in a discipline that is, in effect, a business of placing one foot in front of the other; that has no real balletic or responsive element and can exist only within a narrow chalk-lined tunnel; but that still appears, to the spectator, to be an expression not just of will but of pure personality.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Michael Johnson: 'It's all about the execution – and I like that'</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Why US women are likely to outperform the men again at the Olympics</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Athletics 50 stunning Olympic moments No28: Dick Fosbury introduces 'the flop' <p>His revolutionary technique struck gold in Mexico 1968 but four years later Dick Fosbury failed to qualify for the Munich games</p><p>Dick Fosbury’s route into high jump was fairly straightforward: he liked sport, and wasn’t any good at anything else.

He hadn’t got into the football team, and despite being one of the tallest kids in school had been no more successful at basketball. He tried athletics and, having had a go at a few disciplines, found this was the one at which he was least useless. But Fosbury still spent many years towards the wrong end of the usefulness scale. He likes to tell a story to illustrate just how average he was before he perfected the technique that was to astonish the world and make his name famous: in the mid-60s, while he was at college. “Someone bet me I couldn’t clear a stuffed leather chair,” he says.

“Not only did I lose the bet, I also broke my hand in the crash landing.”</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Why Olympians shine under the spotlight</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Ten to watch: meet Team GB's sporting superheroes</a> </p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Olympic Games 2012 50 stunning Olympic moments No 27: Ann Packer wins 800m in 1964 | Sachin Nakrani Ann Packer is in an elite group of British women who have won Olympic gold in track and field<p>Of all the congratulatory messages that poured Kelly Holmes’s way following her wide-eyed victory in the 2004 800 metres final – the first of the two gold medals she secured at the Athens Games – none reflected the historical significance of what the 34-year-old had achieved on a clear and warm evening in the Greek capital quite like that which came directly to her 24 hours after the race.</p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Ten to watch: meet Team GB's

 sporting superheroes</a> </p><p> <span>Related: </span><a href="">Great Britain to send ‘best-prepared athletics team’ to Rio Olympics</a> </p><p>Stunned disbelief wrapped every British spectator in the National Stadium here this afternoon as the slim form of Miss AE Packer took the sweet strides to an Olympic gold medal in the 800metres and the world record of 2min 1.1sec as well.

It is the most startling result of these Games and one would have to search very hard through Olympic history to find one more surprising in any other Games.</p><p>If Miss Packer found fairies at the bottom of her garden she could have looked no more startled than when she pressed the medal to her cheek after winning a race that she did not want to take part in at one time. The coaching that DCV Watts has planned for her during the past two years had been devised to win the gold medal in the 400m. Racing over two laps was an afterthought, a part of that training programme.</p> <a href="">Continue reading...</a> Athletics

Question: The Western Roll, is a long disused technique, once practised in which sporting event?
Answer: THE HIGH JUMP