Dumas on 8-Foot Leap: ‘What Took So Long?’

Charlie Dumas, the first person to high jump seven feet, had a crisp reaction Monday to news that a Cuban had become the first to clear eight feet.

“What took so long?” he asked.

It had been 33 years and 30 days since Dumas, then a Compton College freshman, broke the seven-foot barrier at the 1956 U.S. Olympic trials at the Coliseum.

“I’m really surprised it took this long,” Dumas said. “After the Fosbury Flop became so widespread in the late 1970s, and they got the world record up to 7-6 and 7-7 so fast, I thought someone would get to eight in the late 1970s.”

Dumas, 52, and his son, Kyle, 17, were fishing for largemouth bass and catfish at Castaic Lake Saturday afternoon, probably when Javier Sotomayor was warming up for his event at a meet in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Sotomayor, a 6-foot-4, 21-year-old, cleared eight feet on his second try, breaking his own world record of 7-11 1/2.

Dumas, a driver education teacher at Jordan High School in Los Angeles, said he was falling asleep in a chair late Saturday night in his Inglewood home when he learned of Sotomayor’s historic leap.

“I heard someone say ‘eight feet’ and that got my attention,” he said.

“I can’t imagine someone jumping that high. It’s a tremendous achievement. When I think of how long I trained, how hard I worked to get that seven-foot jump, well, it’s hard to imagine someone going a foot higher than I did.

“After I did it, a whole bunch of guys went over seven, so now I suppose a bunch will jump eight, too.”

After Dumas had cleared seven for the first time, on the night of June 29, 1956, he went on to Melbourne and jumped 6-11 1/2, winning a gold medal in the Olympics. Ultimately, he cleared seven feet 10 times.

His event was subsequently revolutionized by Dick Fosbury, an Oregon State athlete who invented the flop technique--clearing the bar on one’s back as opposed to going over on one’s stomach. Soon after Fosbury had jumped 7-4 1/4 in winning a gold medal at the 1968 Olympics, old-style leapers became rare.

Dumas, who is 6-2, indicated that eight feet would still be a distant goal had Fosbury never been born.

“I think the world record would still be between 7-7 and 7-8 if he’d never come along,” he said.

“I know one thing--I never would have mastered the flop,” Dumas said. “I just didn’t have that kind of body. I would’ve broken my neck.”