Richard Douglas Fosbury (born March 6, 1947) is an American high jumper, who is considered one of the most influential athletes in the history of track and field. Besides winning a gold medal at the 1968 Olympics, he revolutionized the high jump event, inventing a unique "back-first" technique, now known as the Fosbury Flop, adopted by almost all high jumpers today. His method was to sprint diagonally towards the bar, then curve and leap backwards over the bar, which gave him a much lower center of mass in flight (it was actually below his body) than traditional techniques.

Fosbury had difficulty competing using the dominant high jumping techniques of the period. In his sophomore year, he failed to complete jumps of 5 feet (1.5 m), the qualifying height for many high school track meets. This dominant technique, the straddle method, was a complex motion where an athlete went over the high jump bar facing down, and lifted his legs individually over the bar. Fosbury found it difficult to coordinate all the motions involved in the straddle method, and began to experiment, at age 16, with other ways of doing the high jump.

At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, Fosbury took the gold medal and set a new Olympic record at 2.24 meters (7 ft 4¼ in), displaying the potential of the new technique. Four years later, in Munich, 28 of the 40 competitors used Fosbury's technique, although gold medalist Jüri Tarmak used the straddle technique. By 1980, 13 of the 16 Olympic finalists used it. Today it is the most popular technique in modern high jumping.