top of flop
Flop.
People forget too easily about Debbie Brill. Who?
Debbie Brill who developed “the Brill Bend”. She won the gold medal with that at
the Edinburgh 1970 Commonwealth Games, aged 17 and again, 12 years later in
Brisbane, 29, years old World Cup winner in 1979 and a lifetime best of 1.99 – by the way, she is
a member of the BC Sports Hall of Fame, and .....famous for using the ‘bend’. That
Debbie Brill, I saw only one-time live-in action; at the first world
championships in athletics 1983 with the short, almost diagonal, run up with a
small bend at the end like a field hockey stick.
Brill was born in Mission, British Columbia, one of
five children of a Canadian father and an American mother. She developed her
style of jumping as a preteen on the family farm when her father made a landing
pit containing foam rubber. There is a video of her in 1966, at the age of 13! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoYRGQlfHQA
The technique, which involved jumping over the bar
with her face to the sky and landing on her back, was dubbed the "Brill
bend". Fifty years later she described it as "a natural extension of
what my body was telling me to do. It was physical intuition; it wasn't
anything taught."
I hear you say:” but that’s the Fosbury flop”.
That’s understandable in some ways – she was younger
than Fosbury and consequently missed the chance to debut the radical new
technique under the spotlight of an Olympic Games. It’s quite possible the
process of development would have followed the same arc, albeit at a noticeably
slower pace.
Reading an interview with Brill on the Hall of Fame
website revealed an historic meeting between the two high jumpers who changed
the world. In 1966, when Brill was 13 and Fosbury, who came from nearby Oregon,
USA, 19, both competed in a BC versus Oregon junior match in Vancouver. Neither
was previously aware of the other.
Debbie’s friends came running up to her at one point
saying excitedly, “Hey, it’s amazing—there’s someone else who jumps like you!” “[It]
gave me tremendous relief and encouragement,” Brill recalled in the interview.
“When he came up to me, I couldn’t speak. He just spoke to me and I sort of
felt, Gosh! Wow! . . .”
The incident is also recounted in a biography of
Fosbury by Bob Welch titled, The Wizard of Foz.
“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.”
Maybe others were doing this around that time as well,
by luck it was Dick Fosbury who showed it to the world at the Mexico Olympics
in 1968. But this almost didn’t happen. Fosbury almost failed to qualify.
The 1968 US Olympic Trials was a two-stage process.
Fosbury had won at sea level in Los Angeles, but in the decisive competition at
Echo Summit near Lake Tahoe in the California mountains and at the same
altitude as Mexico City, he had one jump to stay in the competition at a height
three other men had already cleared.
Make it on the final
attempt and Fosbury would remain alive; miss and it would be “say goodnight;
thanks for coming.” Fosbury got over, and when he got the succeeding height and
John Hartfield, who until then led with no misses, did not, he was in the team.
RIP: Richard Douglas Fosbury (March 6, 1947 – March
12, 2023)
sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debbie_Brill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Fosbury
GL:
this is a copy paste copy paste piece by me
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