Fosbury's Flop endured, but the Quande Curl apparently came first

In the 1960s, when high jumpers Debbie Brill, Bruce Quande and the late Dick Fosbury were raising the bar by turning their backs to it, they trained independently of one another and in relative anonymity, at least until the 1968 Olympics changed everything.

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That wouldn't have been quite so odd — without social media and smartphones there was no global obsession with sharing — but for their proximity. Brill grew up in Haney, B.C., Quande in Kalispell, Montana and Fosbury in Medford, Oregon. The sides of a scalene triangle connecting the three locations would be about 930, 1,030 and 1,275 kilometres long.

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In the grand scheme of worldwide athletics, that's some seriously local knowledge, because there seems to be no proof that anybody else on the planet was doing it their way, which is to say bass-ackwards.

"That was the interesting part," said Quande, now 78 and living in Missoula, Mont., with a chuckle. "The conclusion on that was a lack of good high jump coaching in the trees in the northwest."

At the time, most high jump pits were covered only in wood shavings or sand, not foam mats. The favoured techniques were the scissor kick, which allowed jumpers to land on their feet, or the Western Roll, in which jumpers landed facing the ground and could absorb the impact with their arms and torso.

Brill, Quande and Fosbury, however, took a curved path to the bar, turned their backs to it, cleared it head first and landed hard on the shoulders. Fosbury's high school was an early adopter of foam pits and Brill's father had built her one, making it safer and more comfortable to perfect their layback methods. Quande didn't have the luxury of any cushioning and that may have hastened his early exit from the event after high school.

Sixty years hence, their invention — be it the Fosbury Flop, Brill Bend or Quande Curl — is ubiquitous, which speaks to the trio's pioneering exploits. Such is the power of TV and the Olympics that lasting fame was reserved only for Fosbury, who died on March 12 of cancer at age 76.

The Flop was a big hit at the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City, where Fosbury cleared 2.24 metres to win the gold medal, shock the world with his crazy, new style, and influence generations of jumpers to come. Four years later at the Munich Olympics, 28 of the 40 male high jumpers were using the layback method.

"I thought that after I won the gold, one or two jumpers would start using it, but I never really contemplated that it would become the universal technique," Fosbury told a reporter with the International Association of Athletics Federations in 2012. "Yet, it only took a generation. The last straddle jumper at the Olympics was in Seoul (in 1988). It took a little time for European coaches to start teaching it as they had only seen still photos and couldn't understand running around a curve, but it was still a surprise to me what happened."

It was also a surprise to Fosbury that Quande had been the first to do it. The Missoulian newspaper published a photo of Quande arcing backward over a high jump bar at the Montana state high school championships on May 24, 1963, the same year Fosbury said he began jumping that way. Quande said he had been working on his technique since 1961 at Flathead High in Kalispell, an assertion supported by former teammates and rivals.

But Quande didn't win the state title in 1963, the photo didn't generate much buzz, and he wasn't immediately credited with a role in the high jump revolution. However, in 1998, Missoulian reporter Rial Cummings stumbled across that photo in the archives and turned it into a prize-winning story that gave Quande his overdue due. He interviewed several of Quande's contemporaries and they corroborated the timing. He also reached Fosbury.

"I think it's real interesting," Fosbury told Cummings. "Our stories sound parallel. This will be a historical asterisk."

You could call it the requisite 15 minutes of fame for a man whose jumping career peaked in high school and ended a year later when he suffered a herniated disc. Too many years of landing in unforgiving pits may have caught up to Quande.

"I didn't get the attention Dick Fosbury did, but the guys I went to school with all knew about it," said Quande. "I enjoyed that period of time. I do look back and think maybe I should have pursued it. And I think if those foam pads had come along earlier, that would have made a big difference because quite frankly I was landing pretty hard."

Brill's contribution to high jump history is better known than Quande's, and for good reason. She was only 15 in 1968 when Fosbury went viral, but she had been using the Bend for several years. In 1969 she jumped 1.98m, a Canadian women's record that stands today. In 1970, she won Commonwealth Games gold by jumping 1.83m, a height that would have won gold at the 1968 Olympics. And in 1971, she cleared 1.85m to win Pan Am Games gold.

In a 1982 interview with Track and Field News writer Garry Hill, Brill was asked if she wished the jumping style had her name on it rather than Fosbury's, because she had "independently invented the flop." At the time, Quande's high school exploits had gone largely unnoticed.

"No, I’ve never felt that way," Brill said. "I’m quite happy with the way it is. It doesn't matter that people don't know. I want to be great at what I do, but I don't care if I’m not really well known for it. I think maybe I’m happier for it. I don't like the way people look at famous people. I’ve never really had heroes, never looked up to somebody. Even if I couldn't be athletically famous, it wouldn't bother me. That's not what counts anyway. There's a lot more to us than that."

Quande said he never met or spoke to the other two pioneers, but Fosbury and Brill met one another for the first time at a track meet in Vancouver in the summer of 1966 when Brill was 13, Fosbury 19. They were the only jumpers there using the layback style, and their brief conversation left an impression on both of them, as Bob Welch recounted in his biography of Fosbury:

"In a world that saw Brill and Fosbury as different, the two were bonded, if even for a few hours, by their sameness. When they left to go their separate ways, neither foresaw a day when they would blend in like everyone else — not because the two of them would conform to the world, but because the world would conform to them."

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