At a Friday breakfast hosted by the North Fulton Chamber of Commerce, Olympic gold medalist Carl Lewis proved he is as nimble off the field as on.
Engaging a crowd of business people, elected officials and cable television executives, Lewis, 55, relived his Olympian adventures, including the come-from-behind win at the 1996 Atlanta Games when he was a ripe old 35.
Those games gave Lewis his ninth gold medal, and provided a dramatic coda to his Olympic career.
During Atlanta’s trials in the long jump he dropped down to 15th place, and faced the possibility of being shut out of the finals.
Lewis entranced his audience with his account of what happened next. He spoke during a demonstration of cable conglomerate Comcast's X1 platform, which will offer viewers of the Rio Olympic Games a dizzying 6,000 hours of live-streamed broadcasts, organized by athlete, by country, by sport, or through a variety of other filters, and accessible through an "intuitive" dashboard.
The event took place at the Alpharetta headquarters of the North Fulton Chamber, where Lewis answered questions, posed for photographs and signed autographs. Wearing a red X1 polo shirt, he looked fit and smooth-skinned, his head shaved, a gold stud in one ear.
It was his second visit to Atlanta in 10 days. He made an appearance earlier this month to honor the 20th anniversary of the Atlanta games.
After the meeting in Alpharetta, Lewis also made a hastily-arranged stop on the other side of town to speak to a group of children at the East Lake YMCA.
Before he revealed the denouement of the his Atlanta experience to his Alpharetta audience, Lewis gave a primer on the mechanics of running and jumping.
Lewis dominated the long jump even as a high school student, but discovered that the world remembers runners better than jumpers, and so vowed as a young man to win the 100 meter race. He was defeated by Ben Johnson at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, but Johnson was disqualified after he tested positive for steroids.
When they disqualify your time, they also take away your physical medal, said Lewis. Apparently Johnson’s gold had a wrinkled ribbon. Lewis imagined it was wrinkled from Johnson clinging to it as the International Olympic Committee pulled it out of his hands.
Lewis' nine gold medals tie him with multi-medalist Mark Spitz, and put him behind American swimmer Michael Phelps, who has 18.
Born in Birmingham, Lewis was, at 18, the youngest member of the 1980 Olympic team for track and field, though that year the games were boycotted by the U.S.
In 1996, in Atlanta, at 35 “I was an old dog,” he said. He decided to exploit that circumstance, he said, and played up the age factor, limping around like Walter Brennan in “The Real McCoys.”
Unfortunately, his jumps in the trials seemed as arthritic as his act. Then came the moment of truth. Standing and collecting himself before one of his last chances, Lewis silently asked the question, "How do you want to be remembered?"
He knew what his answer was. These were his last Olympics. He didn’t want to be remember as a guy who choked during his last at-bat.
“I had eight gold medals,” he said Friday, “but I knew if I flamed out people would say, ‘Oh, he stayed in the game too long.’”
So he took a breath. And then he ran. “When you hit the take-off board, you know,” he said.
He knew.
With that jump Lewis moved from 15th to first place, and freaked out his opponents. The subsequent jumpers scored 17 fouls between them, he said. Clearly, he had messed with their minds.
On the podium that day in Atlanta, Lewis experienced a remarkable transformation. The desire to compete left him, he said. He was done.
