Valeriy Brumel, the Soviet Union’s 1964 Olympic high jump champion, and six times world record-breaker, was most celebrated in his homeland for an extraordinarily courageous comeback in his event after a motor cycle accident in which he suffered injuries that threatened to prevent him from walking again, let alone jumping athletically over a bar set high above his head.

Brumel, who as born in Tobuzin, Siberia, the son of two geologists, began athletics at the age of 11 and, at 17, precociously cleared 2m (6ft 6¾in). Coached first by Pyotr Stein, he found his life changed when a sports scholarship sent him to Moscow, where he came under the guidance of Vladimir Dyatchkov, a former pole-vaulter, who was the chief Soviet high-jump coach.

To Dyatchkov he owed the discipline of meticulous preparation and the development of a technique that became second nature to him. Brumel soon made such progress that, in the Olympic year of 1960, having finished only sixth in the national championships, he set a European record of 2.17m and was then selected for the Games in Rome. There the 18-year-old, already possessed of a straddle technique described as “smooth as silk”, took the Olympic silver medal behind his 27-year-old team-mate Robert Shavlakadze, while the American world record-holder, John Thomas, affected by nerves, finished third.

After the Olympics, Brumel made three improvements to his European record, up to 2.20m, and then — at an indoor meeting in Leningrad in January 1961 — cleared 2,23m, above the official world outdoor record of Thomas. After Brumel had earned world record ratification with 2.25m in August 1961, he came to the White City, London, the next month and enthralled the unmetric minded crowd by clearing a British all-comers’ record of 7ft 3in. One inventive Fleet Street columnist even claimed Brumel, in training in London, had leapt 7ft “to show me how easy it was”.

Internationally, Brumel made even more impact when, competing for the Soviet Union against the United States before a 95,000 crowd and a vast television audience at Stanford, California, in July 1962, he established a new world record of 2.26m and crushed his old American rival Thomas.

The stimulus of taking on the American was to produce Brumel’s highest ever leap at Moscow in July 1963 when he jumped 2.28m, or 43cms (17in) above his head as he rotated, face downwards, over the bar. Nerves attacked him the following summer at the Tokyo Olympics but in the end he beat Thomas again for the gold medal and dryly adapted the Olympic motto by quipping: “The important thing in the Games is to finish first.”

After a low-key 1965 season, on an October day in Moscow, Brumel’s life changed for ever when, as he rode pillion behind the motorcycling champion Tamara Gelikeva, the vehicle went out of control and crashed into a tree. Brumel, suffering two fractures below the right knee and a multiple fracture of the ankle, endured several operations and was to be in plaster for more than two years.

Yet the champion’s determination that he would somehow jump once more never deserted him, even when, trying to exercise too soon, he broke his leg again. In 1969, encouraged steadily by a group of friends, Brumel returned to high jumping and cleared 2m, followed by other, extraordinary performances reported as 2.06m, and then 2.13m, in 1970.

Following his long battle to recovery, Brumel gained a doctorate in the psychology of sport, and completed two successful theatrical pieces for the Moscow stage as well as a semi-autobiographical book Be True to Yourself.

The second of Brumel’s three marriages was to the gymnast Lyudmila Turischeva, the 1972 Olympic Games gold medallist. He is survived by his third wife Svetlana, a physician, and by a son and stepson.

Valeriy Nikolaevich Brumel, high jumper, was born on April 14, 1942. He died on January 26, 2003, aged 60, after a long illness.