Sprinters are sometimes treated like performing dogs by longer-distance runners. Mary Decker Slaney once scornfully said of Lewis: “His finish line comes up a lot quicker than mine.” But the sprint is a compressed epic, a multiact drama that involves the senses and the minds of these human smart bombs. For coach Tom Tellez, the key to Lewis’s stunning win wasn’t in his legs but in his eyes. In the drama’s Act I-the inertia-assaulting charge out of the starting blocks-Lewis was looking down at the track instead of toward the finish line, as he had done in previous races. That, said Tellez, had left him in a bad position to accelerate. At Tokyo his head was down and he came out blazing.
Blazing for Lewis, that is. A notoriously slow starter, he was one of the last out of the blocks. The star of Act I was Mitchell, whose reaction time at the gun was measured at an astonishing .090 of a second. At about 50 meters, Act II began. Lewis was at least two meters behind the leaders at that point. Mitchell was thinking, “If I got far enough away from Carl, he won’t be able to catch me.” Meanwhile, said Lewis, “I felt great. I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a shot.’ At 80 meters, I felt very good.”
During Act III, from 80 to 90 meters, Lewis was the only one still accelerating. At 90 he had caught everyone but Burrell. As Act IV-the last 10 meters-began, Lewis looked over to check out Burrell. “I knew that Leroy was two lanes over and after I cleared everyone else, I had to find out where he was. " But Burrell, who is legally blind in his right eye, couldn’t see Lewis. Lewis caught Burrell in the final strides and rolled through the finish line as Burrell desperately tried to lean at the tape.
Finishing second, Burrell had broken his own world record of 9.90. “I could have been a bit more technically sound my last 4, 5, 10 meters,” he said. These sprinters are verbalizing events that took place in wordless flashes of consciousness. Their 10 seconds on the track are as big a chunk of psychic time as the 27 minutes taken by a 10,000-meter run. But of course there was an epilogue. In a nanosecond after he had won, Lewis raised his arms in a gesture of triumph and joy. This kind of thing has not endeared him to fellow athletes. In 1983 he lost another world record by making the same gesture at least 10 meters before the tape.
For all his six Olympic and six World Championship gold medals, Lewis has been called a grandstander through much of his career. He’s had to endure rumors of being a closet gay (which he denies) and charges of denouncing others for using performance-enhancing drugs while using them himself. But Lewis has never tested positive for drugs, and until he runs for Congress his private life is his own business. Although his manager once reportedly said that “Carl Lewis is going to be bigger than Michael Jackson,” the U.S. public has never warmed to him as it has to superstars like Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson. But he ranks with Jesse Owens as the greatest American athlete of track and field. And at the advanced age of 30 he’s reached a peak that almost validates the cornball inscription he stuck on his license plate: LIFE HAS NO FINISH LINE.
