Last Updated on February 12, 2016 by Jimson Lee
There was a video going viral on Kenyan High Jumping. The “appeal” was two athletes using non convention high jumping techniques (not the Straddle nor Flop) and the bar “appeared” very high. Plus no fancy crash mat… just sand from the old days!
A closer look at the video shows the bar was slightly over 6 feet or 1.83m.
(Credit goes to Michael Stewart for filming this video, as he spent the first three months working in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley for a Canadian NGO called Run for Life, which primarily uses running to promote education and job skills at schools around the world. He shot the high jump video while attending a track meet outside the town of Mosoriot.)
I am not taking anything away from them (I love healthy drug free competition) but their technique was something to think about… what is it?
Here is the video on YouTube:
High Jump Bar Clearance
In the book Track & Field Omnibook
by Ken Doherty, he distinguishes nine bar clearance techniques and the athlete credited with pioneering each (except for the first):
- Scissors
- Modified Scissors (Page, 1887)
- Eastern Cut-off (Sweeney, 1895)
- Eastern Trail-leg Shift (Oler, 1914)
- Eastern Back-to-the-bar (Larson, 1917)
- Western Roll (Horine, 1912)
- Straddle (Stewart, 1930)
- Dive-Straddle (Cruter, 1938)
- Flop (Fosbury and/or Brill, 1968)
POP QUIZ
Okay High Jump experts, who can identify the technique used by the 2 Kenyans in the video above? It’s not the flop or straddle!
Modify scissors
Well my friend of course we can guess…It’s previous to the straddle and in the Romanian language is called the “scissors” – The OLD Coach – Constantin Dumitrescu – was a specialist of it with 2.04 PB. (1.82m tall, period 1954 -1960, running, jumping and landing on surface earth – talented jumper but never been capable to change his jumping technique and adopting the straddle – no problem as coach he trained few european and world champions in new styles that he never experienced :) ). Is the person I was talking about with your guest Kenta Bell …Here you can find a picture of him jumping at 2.02 at army championships in that technique…
http://sportlogic.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=3238
Meanwhile boys in the video are doing it a little bit differently I think… It is more flexible as style, allowing personal approaches and personal adapted biomechanics of the jump.
I’m saying it’s the Eastern Cutoff.