Bob Welch was 14 when Dick Fosbury won the gold medal in the high jump at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

Welch and his friends in Corvallis would ride their bikes to the old Bell Field at Oregon State University, hop the fence and practice the high jump at the very same pit where Fosbury, their hero, had practiced.

Fifty years later, a seasoned journalist and author of some two dozen books, Welch is telling the complete Fosbury story in his new book “The Wizard of Foz.”

Welch, a longtime Eugene resident and former columnist and associate editor at The Register-Guard newspaper, will be in Bend on Wednesday to talk about the book and answer questions. Welch was also the sports editor at The Bulletin from 1976 to 1981.

Fosbury, who attended Medford High School and then Oregon State, revolutionized the track and field event of high jumping by developing a new technique and turning his back to the bar, a maneuver known ever since as the “Fosbury Flop.” High jumping was never the same again.

Welch’s book highlights Fosbury’s athletic accomplishments, but it also goes deep into the family tragedy that drove him to succeed, painting the portrait of a man whose revolutionary style fit perfectly into a revolutionary time in the United States during the 1960s.

“His intention was never to rebel or be a disrupter, but in fact he was, in the best of senses,” Welch said in an interview with The Bulletin. “He dared to think outside the box and say, ‘Why do we have to do it the same way?’ When you think of protests and people who want change, at the very beginning is the belief that we don’t have to do things the way they’ve been done. And that’s exactly what Dick Fosbury embraced, even though at the time he was just a desperate kid trying to make the Medford High track team.”

Welch first met Fosbury in 1988, when the author wrote a story for Sports Illustrated on the 20th anniversary of Fosbury’s gold medal. In January 2017, Welch realized the 50th anniversary was approaching and he called Fosbury, who was open to the idea of a book.

When Fosbury was 14, his younger brother Greg was killed when the two of them were riding bikes together and Greg was struck by a hit-and-run driver, according to Welch. A year later, Dick’s parents divorced largely because of that, Welch noted. The next year, as the book recounts, he tried out for the Medford High football team, and Bill Enyart, who would go on to play at OSU and in the NFL and later lived in Bend for many years before he died in 2015, shattered Fosbury’s helmet and broke three of his teeth. The injuries effectively ended young Fosbury’s football career.

“He’d lost a brother, he’d lost his parents in a sense, and he’s lost what was esteemed more than anything else in the early ’60s in Medford, Oregon, and that was football,” Welch said. “This was a kid looking for somewhere to belong, somewhere he could feel good about himself. Dick inventing the Fosbury Flop as a sophomore in high school, really, was rooted in desperation. He almost willed himself over that bar, because he feared he wasn’t going to make the team.”

Welch said his long interviews with Fosbury, now 71, seemed to help the former high jumper confront some things about loss and tragedy in his life that he had never before confronted.

As Welch tells in his book, on April 20, 1963, Fosbury, a sophomore at Medford High, was competing in the high jump at the Grants Pass Rotary Invitational.

He asked his coaches if, instead of employing the straddle technique, he could try the scissor — the straddle and scissor being the two conventional high-jumping techniques at the time. His coaches agreed. To that point, Fosbury had never cleared higher than 5 feet, 4 inches.

“Now 5-4 won a lot of JUNIOR HIGH meets in 1963,” Welch said, suggesting that Fosbury was not exactly tearing it up at the high school level. “He (Fosbury) said himself, ‘I was one of the worst high jumpers in the state of Oregon.’”

His first attempt at the scissor in Grants Pass proved to be the inception of the Fosbury Flop.

In midair, he realized that every part of his body was getting over the bar except for his butt, Welch explained.

“So he pushed his butt up, raised his hips, leaned back a little bit, and he got over 5-10,” Welch said. “He had 6 inches improvement in one day with what he called the ‘back layout.’”

Fosbury broke the Medford High School record as a junior and the state record as a senior.

He went on to Oregon State, where inexplicably OSU track coach Berny Wagner tried to get Fosbury to employ the straddle rather than the flop, which Welch details in the book. Eventually Fosbury was allowed to do it his way — which is now every high jumpers’ way — and soon thereafter broke the OSU record with a clearance of 6-10.

The 1968 U.S. Olympic track and field trials were held near Lake Tahoe at Echo Summit, California (7,377 feet in elevation), in the Sierra Nevada on a track that had hundreds of trees in the infield.

The idea was to get the U.S. athletes accustomed to the similar altitude of Mexico City. The track was taken out shortly after the trials, but Welch wanted to find the spot where Fosbury qualified for the 1968 Olympic Team.

“Last fall he met me down there, we traipsed through the woods, and we found, based on photos, boulders and trees, the exact spot where he started his approach for his third and final attempt at 7-2,” Welch said. “If he had missed, he would have not made the team. But he made it, and then he cleared 7-3 on his first attempt and made the team.”

After winning the Olympic gold medal in Mexico City, Fosbury settled into a career as a civil engineer. He is now retired and living near Sun Valley in Bellevue, Idaho.

Welch recalled those days as a youngster in Corvallis, trying to emulate Fosbury.

“I once was sick and stayed home, and I was high jumping onto my bed and broke the slats on my bed doing the Fosbury Flop,” he said with a laugh. “So the flop was just ingrained in me from my youth.”

—Reporter: 541-383-0318,

mmorical@bendbulletin.com