Apparently he started to develop his technique already at age 16, which is seriously impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Fosbury

My grandfather was a high jumper in the former Soviet Union, and he crossed 1.85 m in the 1950s using the "straddle technique": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straddle_technique

Looking for the specialist terms in English, I found a paper with a bunch of geeky figures to compare the different techniques :) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-mechanics-of-the-c...