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Best
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A track-and-field high jump in three timing moves: tap a curving run-up on the beat, plant at the gold take-off mark, then arch and kick over the bar in slow motion. Three attempts per height, and the bar keeps going up.
Tap STRIDE each time a dot on the lane reaches the white line: five long strides on the straight, then five quicker ones on the curve. Press JUMP when your foot reaches the gold mark on the track to take off. In slow motion, press and hold the same button (now ARCH) as your head passes over the bar, and let go to kick as your hips pass.
The run-up has ten strides. The gaps between them shrink from 0.44 seconds on the straight to 0.32 on the curve, and the gold JUMP dot comes 0.30 seconds after the tenth. Your first tap starts you at 3.0 m/s. A tap right on the beat pulls you toward the top speed of 7.0 m/s, closing 35% of the gap each stride, while a tap at the very edge of the timing window only aims for 65% of it. Tapping too early, or letting a dot pass, costs 10% of your speed. The window is ±120 ms at the first height and shrinks by 4% at every new height (±80 ms at 2.00 m, ±60 ms at 2.21 m).
You take off from wherever your foot is at the instant you press JUMP. Your upward speed is 0.70 times your run-up speed, so speed is height: a perfect run puts your centre of mass about 2.35 m high, a run at 6 m/s about 2.05 m. The gold mark shows the best take-off spot for your current speed — about 1.26 m from the bar at 7 m/s and 0.9 m at 5.5 m/s — because a slower jump reaches its peak sooner. Running past the bar without jumping is a miss.
Over the bar the game runs at half speed. Your head, hips and legs cross one after another, about 0.44 seconds apart, and the three lights at the top turn gold just before each one does. Arching lifts your hips but drops your shoulders, so hold ARCH after your head is over and before your hips arrive. Letting go kicks your legs up but drops your hips, so release after the hips and before the legs. Each move takes 0.2 seconds to complete, and any body part caught in the wrong position is 15 cm lower. If any part touches the bar, the bar falls and the attempt is a miss.
The bar starts at 1.50 m and rises 5 cm up to 2.00 m, then 3 cm up to 2.24 m, then 2 cm at a time. You get three attempts at each height; clear it and you move up, miss three times and the competition is over. No technique can lift the bar above your centre of mass, which can never pass 2.37 m, so 2.36 m is the highest bar anyone can clear and every game ends.
Your result is your best height, then the number of misses at the heights you cleared (fewer is better), then how much room you had at your best height, measured to a tenth of a millimetre.
Speed is height, and your speed is set by the rhythm. Each half metre per second adds roughly 15 cm to the top of your jump: about 1.90 m at 5.5 m/s, 2.05 m at 6 m/s, 2.20 m at 6.5 m/s and 2.35 m near the top speed. You only get ten strides, so a single early tap or a skipped dot late in the run costs 10% that there is no room to win back. The five curve strides come faster and closer together — keep your eyes on the lane, not the runner, and let the dots set the pace instead of anticipating the speed-up.
Take off from the gold mark, not from where you think the bar is. The mark slides closer to the bar when you are slower, because a lower jump peaks sooner. At top speed you cover 7 cm every hundredth of a second: missing the mark by 20 cm costs about 3 cm of height, 30 cm about 7 cm. Too far out and you are already falling when your hips reach the bar; too close and you are still rising into it, and the message after a miss tells you which one it was.
The flight is two presses on one button: down as the head goes over, up as the hips go over. Watch the three lights at the top — when Head turns gold, press and hold; when Hips turns gold, get ready to let go. Holding too long means the calves drag, letting go early drops the hips, and arching early knocks the bar with your shoulders. On the first heights you can clear the bar even with no arch at all, so use them to learn the two moments before the margins get small.
In a tight competition, misses decide places. Two players who both stop at the same height are separated by how many failed attempts they had on the way, and then by how much room they had over their best bar, so a clean first-attempt record is worth more than a lucky clearance on the third try. The back-first style you use here took over the event in the late 1960s precisely because it lets the body pass over the bar while the centre of mass stays close to it.