A view of Athletics, number 4: Paris 1924 recalled-Charley Paddock’s leap of faith

Paris 1924 recalled – Charley Paddock’s leap of faith.

It was easy with the high jump. Dick Fosbury invented the Fosbury Flop and won the 1968 Olympic title, clearing the bar backward – or, as any other high jumper of that era would have said, the wrong way round.

But then, perhaps not any other high jumper. As by that time, a young Canadian named Debbie Brill, who would go on to win two Commonwealth titles, was independently developing a similar technique in which she went over the bar face upwards…

So – not so incredibly easy.

Anyway – let’s transpose that flying athlete thing to the track.

Eight years ago, I was in a damp and not entirely full stadium at the Rio 2016 Olympics and heard the crowd sound during the women’s 400-meter shift from excited to confounded.

The alteration in tone had occurred during an all-action finish in which 22-year-old Shaunae Miller of The Bahamas, under remorseless pressure from US runner Allyson Felix, had either collapsed or dived over the line and hit the deck hard.

My first thought was that Miller had run out of gas and blown it. I was wrong. She had claimed gold in 49.44sec, with Felix, who finished in traditional fashion, having to settle for silver in 49.51.

This was perhaps the most famous example of diving in an athletics track event.

But then – maybe it wasn’t a dive. Some years afterward, Britain’s Sydney 2000 women’s 400m bronze medallist Katharine Merry told me she thought Miller had indeed simply run out of gas and crumpled. Miller – nowadays Mrs. Miller-Uibo, proud parent of one son with Estonian decathlete Maicel Uibo – has said so herself.

A year later, a similar thing happened to her in the world 400m final in London, where she crumpled again at the finish, losing what had looked to be another global title and eventually finishing fourth.

So – not so definitely a diver.

There have, of course, been very definite divers. At the Beijing 2008 Games, American 400m runner David Neville earned the bronze medal by flinging himself across the line.

A couple of hours before Miller won in Rio, 24-year-old Brazilian hurdler Joao Vitor de Oliveira reached the semi-finals of the 110m hurdles with a proper Superman effort.

More recently, in 2019, footage went viral of the men’s 400 meters hurdles final at the Southeastern Conference Track & Field Championships in the United States, which concluded with the improbably named Infinite Tucker beating a Texas A&M University team-mate to the line with a…