Harold Osborn - High Jumping Styles

High Jumping Styles

Harold M. Osborn developed a unique variation of the Western roll style of high jumping. While Osborn was practicing his hurdles and jumping in the field at his farm home in Illinois, the Western roll was gradually replacing an earlier jumping style called the scissor-kick. In the Western roll, the bar was approached on a diagonal—the inner leg used for the take‑off, while the outer leg was thrust up to lead the body sideways over the bar. Using the Western roll, George Horine first took the world high jump standard to 6 ft 7 in (2.01 m) in 1912. Horine is sometimes cited as the originator of the style.

Osborn worked on his own form and obviously paid attention to the style that was developing as he competed in high school and at the University of Illinois. He modified the Western roll technique by developing an efficient side‑to‑the‑bar clearance, which resulted in more height and consistency. His jumping style was sometimes referred to as the Osborn roll, but is also often lumped together with other variations of the style of jumping that is generally referred to as the Western roll. By 1924 he was using the style to attain new heights.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Osborn corresponded from time to time with Volker Kluge of Altenburg, Germany, a journalist who published a sports magazine, and who had a passionate interest in the Olympics and the changes in track and field over the years. Volker asked Osborn many questions about his participation in the '24 Olympics and published articles about Osborn and other athletes who competed in Europe. In a letter to Volker dated January 31, 1969, Osborn described how he developed his style of jumping: “I more or less found my style of high jumping by accident, as I was trying to imitate Ed Beeson’s style, and what developed was natural to me, and as I became more proficient and with much practice, I utilized leg and arm lift and body ‛kip’ and then slid across the bar more or less on my back, and as I got to the far side of the bar then started to uncoil and dropped my take-off leg and arms for landing.”

Ed Beeson was a Berkeley student and track competitor who also used the Western roll style. In the same letter to Volker, Osborn commented on Dick Fosbury’s jumping style—the Fosbury Flop. Osborn wrote that Fosbury’s style would have been illegal when he was competing in 1924 because the rules did not allow the head to cross the bar first. The flop was an innovation in the high jump that attracted a lot of attention when Fosbury introduced it at the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City. Fosbury jumped with his back to the bar and went over head first. It required much more cushioning on the landing side, also a dramatic change from the days when Osborn jumped into sand.

Osborn was inducted into the Track and Field Hall of Fame in 1974.