‘If people say I was on drugs I get it, but I was better than anyone else,’ says outspoken Athletics legend CARL LEWIS… as he gives both barrels to the youth of today and calls out ‘childish’ Daley Thompson

Forty years after he announced himself as the fastest man on the planet, Carl Lewis still shows no signs of slowing down. ‘Every year I do something I never thought I would, something crazy,’ says the nine-time Olympic champion.

‘I tried to bench press 300lbs (136kg) when I turned 60. I sky dived at 61. I’m 62 and I want to do a split. At 63, I am going to scuba dive 63ft.’

Lewis has already got a goal in mind for when he is 67 — lighting the Olympic flame at Los Angeles 2028. ‘I don’t want to say too much because then they probably won’t do it,’ he says. ‘But it would just be amazing for me to do that.’

The American seems the obvious candidate. After all, he was the man who lit up LA the last time the Olympics were there in 1984, winning a famous four gold medals in the 100metres, 200m, 4x100m relay and long jump. Lewis was just 23 then. Now he is a grandfather approaching retirement age. Yet as he sits with Mail Sport on the terrace of his five-star hotel in the Bahamas he looks as athletic as ever, his muscular frame filling out his polo shirt and shorts.

Despite his reputation for being cold and aloof, the Son of the Wind is warm and welcoming on the afternoon we meet. But it soon becomes clear the big ego and sharp tongue remain. First in Lewis’ firing line: the youth of today.

‘I don’t see anyone jumping and doing the sprints now,’ he begins, battling to be heard over the horn of a Caribbean cruise ship nearby.

‘I don’t think our culture is raising kids to do that any more. It’s just not in the culture to work that hard. What I had to go through, a kid now would be like, “Oh no, got to stop, mental health”.

‘The only reason I won four was because I tried it. They talk about how Michael Jordan always hit the clutch shot. Well, that’s because he wasn’t afraid to take it.’

Lewis remains the last track and field athlete to win four golds at the same Games. Only one other man has done so in the three sprint events and long jump — his hero Jesse Owens at Berlin 1936.

‘Jesse was definitely the impetus to do it,’ says Lewis. ‘But that was the personal bit. There was also the business side. In those days, the world’s fastest human was money, notoriety, recognition. It was all the things I needed and wanted. I realised if I could win all four, I could take the sport wherever. I really wanted to be a global superstar and I worked for it.’

Lewis was so confident his worth would rocket after LA he turned down a lucrative deal with Coca-Cola. His agent Joe Douglas said: ‘When Carl negotiates his contracts after the Olympics, he’ll be just as valuable as Michael Jackson.’

Lewis knew his plan for superstardom would be in tatters if he failed to win his first event at the ’84 Games — the 100m. ‘It’s hard to articulate what the pressure was on that race,’ he recalls. ‘If I had lost then the story was over.’

Lewis won in a time of 9.99sec but was criticised for taking a USA flag from a spectator and carrying it around the track on his victory lap, a celebration never previously seen in athletics. ‘A lot of things I did then were controversial and now they are normal,’ he says.

More controversy followed in his next final. An expectant LA crowd had come to see Lewis break Bob Beamon’s 1968 long jump world record of 8.90m. Yet after Lewis opened with what turned out to be a winning leap of 8.54m, he fouled his next effort and skipped his other four jumps to conserve his energy for his next event. Despite winning gold, he was booed.

Lewis blames the sport’s powerbrokers for not explaining his situation. ‘I totally get it,’ he says. ‘The crowd had no idea and were never educated by the people that should have educated them.

‘That was in the middle of me fighting for professionalism. So the IAAF (now World Athletics) were totally against me. No one came to my defence because they were trying to destroy me. It was like, “This is the guy that’s pushing for professionalism. He’s going to become a freaking global superstar and blow everything up. We got to stop this”.’

Two days later, Lewis won the 200m in an Olympic record 19.80sec. But he then ended up at the centre of another storm when Britain’s Daley Thompson wore a T-shirt to his press conference that read, ‘Is the world’s second-greatest athlete gay?’, amid rumours of Lewis’ sexuality. ‘I thought it was childish then and I still do,’ says Lewis, who has a son, Bakim, with his wife, Maria.

‘I was really focused on how I could make the sport better and he was being childish with a T-shirt. I was so big in the sport and the vast majority of athletes were against me.

‘When I started pushing for all these reforms, the athletes didn’t support me. I was called aloof and arrogant. And I get it now. I was arrogant because I said I’d win four — and I did it.’

Lewis completed his quadruple by anchoring the USA’s 4x100m relay quartet with the only track-and-field world record of the Games. Yet the endorsements he expected did not come, largely because of his negative image.

Even now, Lewis continues to divide opinion. Not that he cares.

‘My name and brand are known by over three billion people,’ he adds. ‘So at any given moment, hundreds of millions of people are lighting my ass up and hundreds of millions are saying, “He’s the greatest thing that’s ever lived”.’ 

As far as Lewis is concerned, his four in ’84 was not his greatest achievement. That, he says, was claiming his fourth straight long jump gold medal at Atlanta 1996.

‘I tried four times to win four golds in a Games and only did it once,’ he says. ‘So the proudest is four in a row. The longevity. When I was in Atlanta, there was a guy that said, “My father took me to see you in LA, and now I am here with my son”. That was crazy.’

The most contentious of his nine gold medals — a haul that has only been surpassed by US swimmer Michael Phelps — was his gong from the 100m at Seoul 1988.

Lewis finished second but had his medal upgraded when Canadian Ben Johnson was stripped of his gold — and world record of 9.79sec — for testing positive for anabolic steroid stanozolol. It remains one of the biggest scandals in Olympic history but Lewis says: ‘I don’t look at that as a negative. That might be the most important moment in drug testing sports history — and I was a part of that moment.’

That 1988 final is now known as the ‘dirtiest race in history’. Five of the other seven athletes went on to test positive or be involved in the use or supply of performance-enhancing drugs, including Lewis.

In 2003, it emerged he had failed three tests at the 1988 US Olympic trials but was cleared of inadvertent doping after claiming he had only taken an over-the-counter herbal remedy, which contained three banned stimulants. The US Olympic Committee were accused of a major cover-up — but Lewis is at pains to point out the level of stimulants in his sample would now register a negative result. ‘We know now it means nothing,’ he insists. ‘It’s not even close.

‘If people want to say I was on drugs, I get it. But I remember in 1983, when I set the American 200m record, I went across the line and I was like, “I am just so much f****** better than them. I have been given more talent than them. Don’t f*** it up”. That’s really what inspired me. I get people saying, “Oh, Ben really won the race”. But I’m just like, “God bless you”.’

Despite his credibility being hit by the 2003 revelations, Lewis has never shied away from speaking out on doping. In 2008, after Usain Bolt broke both the 100m and 200m world records, Lewis queried if he was clean, saying: ‘To run 10.03 one year and 9.69 the next, if you don’t question it in a sport that has the reputation it has you’re a fool.’

Asked if he still questions Bolt’s times, Lewis says: ‘I am 62, I don’t have time for drama any more. He is retired, I am retired. I hope everything is going wonderful for him. A lot of people in the sport miss him and I wish him the best.’

Does he think athletics is clean now? ‘I think there are still people,’ Lewis replies. ‘But in the sprints and jumps, look at the people. Sprinters got huge and they stayed huge, and now they are small again. There is something to that.

‘It’s lazy for people to say, “So and so is on drugs” because there are a lot of differences from our time. Nutrition is better. The tracks are better. Shoes make a big difference. Those spikes are crazy. But I think it’s good. The technology, the innovation, I love all of it.

‘You live in your era. I ran 9.86 33 years ago and a lot of people have run 9.86 since. But you know what? I would have been on every podium since then apart from 2012.’

Since hanging up his spikes 27 years ago, Lewis has tried his hand as an actor, singer and politician. But he has returned to athletics as head coach at the University of Houston. ‘I never wanted to coach, I don’t know how that happened,’ he laughs. ‘I thought when I retired I would have a shelf life.’

Lewis is contracted with Nike until 2028 and will be working with them at the Paris Olympics. He also recently acted as an ambassador for World Athletics at the World Relays, which is what brings us to the Bahamas.

Intriguingly, he was signed up after he took the governing body to task over their radical plan to revamp the long jump, questioning whether it was an ‘April Fools’ joke’.

‘I am not going back from what I said because I don’t agree with it and I don’t think it’s going to help,’ says Lewis on replacing take-off boards with a zone in a bid to eliminate fouls. ‘The reason the rate of fouling is high is because the event is difficult. But that’s the beauty of the long jump. When you take away that challenge, you have created a new event.’

He is more enthused about the quality of sprinters. Lewis particularly likes American star Noah Lyles, who became the first man since Bolt to complete the 100m, 200m and 4x100m treble at a World Championships last year.

Lyles intends to emulate Lewis and win four golds at Paris 2024 by running in the 4x400m relay. When he was included in the US quartet at the World Indoor Championships in March, there was outrage among other athletes. But Lewis says: ‘I don’t have a problem with someone saying, “I want to win another gold medal for America”.

‘It’s hard enough to win three. But if he wins the 100, 200 and 4×100, would everybody want him to run the 4×400? Absolutely. That could be wonderful for the sport.

‘The sport needs someone to be dominant because the public likes to attach to someone. Right now, there’s no emotion to it. It’s just like, “Who’s going to win?”.’

That is a question Lewis says is impossible to answer for the men’s 100m in Paris. He does, though, believe Britain’s Zharnel Hughes — who false-started in the final at Tokyo 2020 but claimed a world bronze last year — is a contender.

‘I really like him,’ admits Lewis. ‘I think he would have won in Tokyo if he didn’t false-start. He looked great in the semi-final. I’m not saying he’s going to win but he’s definitely one of the top guys.’

Interest in the 100m will ramp up when a Netflix series on sprinters airs before the Olympics. Lewis, though, warns it will take more than a TV show to save his sport.

‘Of course I worry,’ he says about athletics’ declining popularity. ‘Noah has a personality but it’s much bigger than him. Usain did a tremendous job but he didn’t grow the sport.

‘We have too many athletes and we should limit the amount that can go to the Diamond League to no more than 30. Then the Continental Tour, another number. Then after that, everyone needs to get a job. It’s not easy, but it’s real.

‘The NBA doesn’t have unlimited people playing. Every sport has a finite amount of people but ours does not. They need to focus on the ones that are great.’

And few have been greater than Frederick Carlton Lewis.