Athlete of the Century—Carl Lewis

If there were a gold medal for cockiness, he would have won it too. But behind all the flash was one of the fastest men ever.

by Skip Hollandsworth

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The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles were supposed to be Lewis’ coronation, the time when the vast majority of Americans would pay court. But they were confused by what they saw. Before the Olympics, Lewis talked about how he had been taking acting and singing lessons, and he predicted that he would be “a respected entertainer” within five years. His own manager went so far as to tell the media, “We think Carl will be bigger than Michael Jackson.” Although he did do something in 1984 that will perhaps never be done again—he won gold medals in the 100 meters, the 200 meters, the 4 by 100 relay, and the long jump—the public saw Lewis as someone who was using his athletic career as a way to land big-money endorsements and get Hollywood’s attention.

During the finals of the long jump that year, he registered an opening jump of 28 feet, 1/4 inch, good enough for first place, and then passed on his next four attempts. Although Lewis was wisely conserving his strength for the later sprinting events—he also knew the other competitors would not come close to his one attempt, and indeed, they did not—the 80,000-plus fans at the Los Angeles Coliseum jeered him for not attempting a world record. By the time the Olympics were over, he was being called an arrogant and greedy athlete, the Maria Callas of the Cinders. After the 1984 Games, David Letterman had a young African American boy on his show dressed up to look like Lewis “What’s your name?” Letterman asked. “Gimme twenty bucks and I’ll tell you,” the boy said. The skit brought down the house.

“I couldn’t do anything back then without someone saying it was calculated,” Lewis told me. “Do you remember how I grabbed that big U.S. flag after the one hundred meters and carried it around the track? People said I had planted somebody there by the track with the flag. That’s completely untrue. It was pure luck that I saw the flag.”

At least he was adored by Europeans, who’ve always had a greater appreciation of track and field. King Carl, as he was known in Europe, received commercial endorsements overseas, and one of the albums he recorded sold more than half a million copies in Sweden. But in America, he was considered too far outside the mainstream to be a major product spokesman. Mary Lou Retton and other stars from the ’84 Olympics made the cover of Wheaties boxes, but not Lewis, whose sexuality was the subject of so many rumors that he felt obligated to deny them in his autobiography, Inside Track.

Still, Lewis kept getting faster and jumping farther, establishing a benchmark of greatness. Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson was so consumed with beating Lewis that he started taking large doses of illegal steroids before the 1988 Olympics. (Johnson did win the 100-meter final, but after he tested positive for drugs, he was stripped of his gold medal and it was given to Lewis, who had finished second.) At the 1991 World Championships, Lewis, then thirty years old, ancient for a sprinter, set a world record in the 100 meters with a time of 9.86 seconds, and in the long jump he leapt 29 feet, 1 1⁄4 inches—the best jump of his life. At that meet, he lost the long jump to Mike Powell, who broke Beamon’s world record, but Powell rarely came close to that jump again. Lewis, on the other hand, had gone undefeated in the long jump for a decade, winning more than 65 straight long jump competitions.

As the years progressed, Lewis never lost his ability to be controversial. He regularly attacked track and field’s governing body over the way it promoted its athletes (poorly, he believed). He fought for above-the-table payments for the sport’s stars. He led the charge to improve drug testing. He publicly confronted people he suspected of cheating, once accusing the great American sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner of using performance-enhancing drugs. Although Lewis himself never tested positive at a track meet for drug use, his allegations about the amount of steroid use on the circuit cost him the friendship of his rivals, many of whom will not speak to him to this day. He professed not to care. “My parents taught me there was a right and a wrong,” he said, “and that you speak out for what is right no matter how much you get criticized.”

What was often lost in the stories about Lewis was that he could be a genuinely affable person. It was true that he played a little too strongly to the cameras and to the crowd, inevitably raising his arms a nanosecond after passing the finish line. (He once admitted that he advised fellow sprinter Joe DeLoach to “make sure you keep waving” when running a victory lap.) But there was another side of him. In public, for instance, he never expressed anything but concern for Ben Johnson after Johnson tested positive for steroids.

By 1996, Lewis was the grand old man of track and field—but he kept training, hoping for one more shot at the Olympics. He turned to weight lifting, fine-tuned his vegetarian diet, and went to several little-known Texas meets, far from the network television cameras, to work on his sprints. Because of cramps he fared badly in the Olympic trials, barely making the team in the long jump. But at the Atlanta Games, he uncorked another nearly 28-foot jump at the very end of the competition to win the gold. The American crowd unleashed the kind of roar for Lewis that he had not heard in many years. Sports Illustrated, which had published more than one negative story about him over the years—“They basically said I was an asshole,” Lewis recalled—called him a “gentleman.” “Things have a way of coming back around,” he noted. “Don’t they?”

THESE DAYS LEWIS HAS A HOME IN LOS Angeles, Angeles, where he says he is actively pursuing his old dream of being an actor. He has created his own line of sportswear, SMTC (the initials of the Santa Monica Track Club, where he used to train), and it’s selling in such high-end stores as Saks Fifth Avenue. “I’m hoping we’ll soon be as well-known as DKNY or Prada Sport,” he said. “This is a new life for me, and it’s very exciting.”

But his old life is exciting too. Although he downplays it, he is still working out, lifting weights, cycling, running long distances one day a week and then sprints another day. His body is still cut to a fine edge. “It wouldn’t take him long to be back at a competitive level,” his former Houston coach Tom Tellez told me. “I don’t know if he could get back his old sprinting form, but he could easily outjump most people who are on the circuit now.”

I asked Lewis how often he thought about the next Olympics, where he might win an unprecedented tenth career track and field gold medal (he and Paavo Nurmi, a distance runner from the twenties, hold the record with nine.) “I don’t think about it,” he said. “I really am moving on.”

He paused and gave me an impish smile. “But I have to say, now that I think about it, it would be a nice encore, wouldn’t it?”

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