Sports science has got better, but the mechanics of running are worse now: Carl Lewis

Things didn’t go so well for Carl Lewis the last time he was in New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. Lewis might be one of the all-time greats of track and field, with nine Olympic and eight world Championship gold medals, but in his only time racing in India—at the International Athletic Meet in 1989, the jetlagged American was beaten by a little-known Austrian runner, Andreas Burger, in the 100m race. Things aren’t going to be nearly as stressful for Lewis this Sunday at the JLN stadium. He’ll get to put his feet up as the chief guest at the Vedanta Delhi Half Marathon.

At a freewheeling exchange with reporters at the same venue, Lewis spoke not just about his interest in long-distance running, but also how social media has warped goals for younger athletes today, his coaching career, where he would stand amongst the worlds best runners, and how his life could come full circle at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

You were one of the greats of short sprints and the long jump? Do you enjoy long-distance running?

I don’t enjoy it myself! I’m horrible. You would never want to see me run distance. It’s just a painful sight. Part of the reason I don’t like to watch a lot of distance races is because I wasn’t very good at it. I was just horrible at it.

What do you miss the most about your time as an athlete?

What I missed the most when I stopped sports was practice. The meets in stadiums and competitions are fine, but the thing is that when I was there, we were all in our 20s and 30s, there was a group of eight of us, and we were practising together, we were hanging out together. I remember one day we went just to gawk at the motorcycle store. We were gawking at these motorcycles, and the next day we all bought motorcycles. And then we’d say, ‘What are you doing?’ If we weren’t doing anything, we’d just decide to go on a camping trip. I miss that camaraderie. As you get older, you get families, and now we’re in our 50s and 60s, and everybody’s gone all over the place. I miss that. I really do miss that.

What kind of person is Carl Lewis these days?

Carl Lewis is a homebody. I’ve had someone cook for me since the mid-eighties. So, every day I go to practice with the kids (He’s currently the chief track and field coach at his alma mater, The University of Houston). I leave training around the same time every day. I come home for dinner, and I don’t ask what’s there. I just come home and eat whatever is made. Then I take a nap and then at 5 o’clock I’m back up.

In the 80s and 90s, sports science hadn’t advanced to the level where we are at right now. Do you think the human excellence part of running has kept up?

I think some things are better. And I think some things are worse. I think diet, nutrition are much better. I think video and recording, and analysis are much better. But the mechanics of running are worse now than they used to be. On my  Instagram page every day, I see 10-15 people promoting their running, and at least 95 per cent of them are completely wrong. So, what we’ve done is 30, 40 years ago, there was accountability. There was no way for people who didn’t know what they were talking about to communicate. If you’re in sports, the best people don’t advertise. Other people advertise for them. If you’re following someone who’s doing a lot of advertising, always talking, they don’t know what they’re talking about. The one thing that doesn’t change is the science (of running mechanics). I think overall, especially in America, we have fewer physical education teachers. Most coaches now have no background whatsoever in athletics and have no interest in learning. They just go out and start giving workouts without understanding that they’re really hurting kids, because if they don’t understand the movement and the body and the structure, then kids are doing things incorrectly.

Why do you think this is the case?

Right now, people are getting tricked by reality TV and social media. People go to their social media and celebrate mediocrity. We’re in a society where social media has changed everything. It took away excellence and it gave ‘winning’. The people with the vast majority of followers are clowns. It’s clowns or porn. How are they up to five million followers? Because they’re silly. Well, there’s so much of that, of just doing something for the sake of doing something. And there’s nothing concrete to it. So, now athletes think that [having] one million followers replaces excellent performance.

We are seeing a lot of top athletes taking part in the Enhanced Games. What do you make of it?

I think we have to look at it in totality of how our world is. So much of the world depends on what’s fake. I think that the bigger issue is we have to be realistic and honest about what we’re doing.

In the past, we wouldn’t even have been in a position to talk about the Enhanced Games. When people would say, ‘Let them take what they want,’ the world would just shut them down. But now we’re in a world where nothing matters as long as you are famous. It’s not really about sports; it’s about culture. The culture now is that you allow fake things to be important. And you allow someone on a TV show to become president one day because they think you’re good because of a TV show.

I still don’t think the Enhanced Games are going to be successful because what corporation would want to align themselves with it? Because who do you sell products to? Families and kids.

I don’t think it’ll be successful for that reason. Most of the athletes are signing not because they want to see what they can do with drugs, it’s because of money. If they said, ‘Let’s have Enhanced Games and if you win, we will give you a medal,’ they won’t have anyone sign up if there was no money involved.

What advice would you give the younger generation of athletes if they wanted to be a top-level athlete?

I’d say two things. Number one—if life were easy, everybody would be good at it. Number two is, I used to miss the parties, now I give them.

That means you’re going to have to sacrifice a lot to be who you want to be. It’s about knowing that maybe you’ll benefit 10, 20 years from now. It’s a sacrifice that we’re not pushing our kids to take anymore. We want kids to be happy. I want them to be successful. I have kids right now who, when we talk about recruiting schools, we will give them a scholarship. And some kids will give like a 90 per cent scholarship.

Then another school comes in and says I’ll give you all this plus 5,000 dollars extra. And that kid says, ‘Well, coach, what should I do?’ I said, ‘Well, you can take the extra 5,000 dollars and go to that other school.’ But when you’re watching me in LA with the guy who came to University of Houston, you’re going to say, ‘Man, I should have made that long-term goal.’

When I came to Houston, the coach was new. The facilities were terrible. And it was in a city that was still trying to figure it out. It was crazy. It was not a very good school. Everyone said, ‘How did he go there?’

But I knew exactly what I wanted, and I was willing to sacrifice going to that school. And then, like I said earlier, coach Telez changed my technique 100 per cent.

I was not afraid to change. But I also spent a third of my time thinking if it was going to be worth it. But I had the courage to keep going long enough to where I could see the benefit. So, that’s really what it is. When kids come to our school, I tell them, ‘100 per cent of the kids have something to change.’

Last year, we had a kid that won the NCAA. He came there, he fixed it in a year. You have other kids, it took two years. So, it just depends. The most important thing is to get away from instant gratification.

I remind the kids, when I was 17, I was fifth in the world. When I was 18, I was an Olympian. When I was 19, I set my first world record. When I was 20, I was making six figures. But I was still an idiot, because I was still at that age. Nothing sped up the ageing process. It’s just that I had success. And so I try to remind them, it doesn’t matter how good you are, how talented you are, how hard you work, you’re still who you are and you still need to learn.

What guided you through those days when you were young and successful? Was it your coach (Tom Tellez, who coached him all the way from his time at the University of Houston) or your parents?

Coach Telez didn’t bother with the money at all. Neither did my family and parents. I hired a manager and an accountant pretty early. And I made some financial mistakes early, early enough where they could tell me, ‘You know, see what happens, we’re going to do this.’ And so I understood and respected that. One of the things that I knew all along was that I was very concerned about retirement. My entire career, I was like, there’s no way I can ride this all the way. You have to remember that when I went to the Olympic Games, athletes didn’t go to two or three. Maybe two, never three, never four. It just didn’t happen.

So, I had to consider the fact that I’d probably retire in my 20s. So, I had to get it together because I thought I would never match this the rest of my life. So, therefore , I need to prepare myself for that.

You won your fourth long Jump Olympic gold at 35 in Atlanta. Now you are passing on that knowledge to students. What do you think these kids need to be taught?

The challenge is that society is not telling kids they’re wrong about anything. Society says, ‘Oh, they’re smarter than you,’ and they’re not holding them accountable. They’re not pushing them to the level. I think we are underselling the world’s children, especially in America.

The kids are spoiled. They can’t do anything. They’ve got mental health people everywhere. I think that we’re selling them short. Kids are so much more resilient. They’re smarter. They can handle things. But we’re almost teaching them not to be able to handle things and not pushing them enough so they can find their potential, so that when they do have issues, they can’t handle it.

We’re in a place in society where the main thing is to find those kids who can be tough. I know that every single athlete on that team, I push to be excellent.

You are sort of the daddy to this team of 95 athletes. It must give you a lot of satisfaction to pass that wisdom along.

Granddaddy really. The thing is that my parents were coaches and teachers. To be honest, I had absolutely less than zero desire to be a coach. I did not want to do this. But I began to volunteer, and it evolved. What I tell the kids is that it evolved for two reasons. Number one, I said at 52, ‘Okay, I’ll volunteer.’ I had time, and I could afford it. And so now I continue to do that, even though I technically lose money every day, going out there coaching. I’m at a place where, when I was their age, I worked hard, travelled the world. I saved my money, and I made sure that when I left something or someone or anything, that they’d invite me back.

That’s the best message I’m trying to teach them. Last year, we had 113 athletes in our programme. Of those, just two continued post-collegiate. So, 111 are just gonna go get a job. I’m not just coaching athletes. I’m coaching people to get jobs and that’s the reality of it.

And so, I remind them the day they get to college, I ask them, ‘Why do you go to college?’ And they say, ‘To get my degree, to get my education, to get my thing.’ I said, ‘No, to make money. I’m here to help you make money so you can get generational wealth for your family. And the number one issue I have is to make sure I get you out of your parents’ home permanently. That’s the number one deal.’

That’s what makes this worth it more than just going out and running track, because we’re doing all these things. I tell them, ‘I hope you all go out and get very rich and everything else and appreciate what we’ve done for you and come back and help those kids like I did.’

In a way, life has come full circle for you. You had your moment of greatness in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, where you won four gold medals. And now the Games are coming back to Los Angeles in 2028. What’s your role in the 2028 Games?

I’ve been involved in some capacity since 2015. I think the Los Angeles Games are going to be incredible. Going to the Olympics is amazing. Period. But to have the Olympics in your own country, it’s a whole other level. I’ve known about this since 2015, when they said they’re going to do this. I was already coaching. So, I felt that if they got the Games here, I might have the chance to go back with an athlete of my own. I probably have two or three athletes who I’m working with who are almost guaranteed to be in LA. I think it would be great for the city, great for the country.

How badly would you love to have raced this generation of athletes?

Yeah, I would love to have run against a lot of generations—not just this one or even the past ones like the Usain Bolts. You go way back. I would have loved to have run against Jesse Owens; I would have loved to have run against Bob Hayes, Tommy Smith, John Carlos, Steve Williams. I did run against Steve Williams once or twice.

I ain’t worried about these (generation of) kids. When I’m asked this, I always think that the greatest would be the greatest. The ones that dominate a generation will dominate any generation. So, I would love to run against Jesse Owens, just to say I did.

What about this generation of athletes?

I think that when we talk about the greatest of anything, it’s how you change your generation, and what you leave behind. And those things cannot be determined for 10 or 20 years after you’re finished. Because it’s sports, it’s culture, it’s everything. If I was around now, I’d think ‘Ooh, I have a lot of followers.’

I think I wanted to entertain, but I wanted to entertain on the track. Whereas now, kids think that the entertainment comes first and then their performance. I talk to the women in our team about how they dress and present themselves. So much now is when women get on a track, they’re just thinking about makeup, eyelashes, hair. It’s ridiculous. When I tell them ‘You aren’t focussed’, they tell me ‘I want to look beautiful.’

I tell them every time, ‘I’ve never seen anyone on a podium that isn’t beautiful.’ Never. I don’t care what they look like. A Martian will look great on the top of a podium with their anthem being played. But things are different because of social media. It’s all about how you present yourself to people. It’s about asking for acceptance rather than performing and earning respect.

What do you think you will be doing after the LA Olympics?

I don’t know exactly. I’m not going to coach forever because I’ll be 67 or 68 when those Olympics come. I don’t know how to plan it. I’m not a fisherman. I’m definitely not a golfer; it’s too slow. I think the thing is that, here again, when I stop coaching, there are two levels to it. The first thing I’d probably stop is college coaching, because that’s a full-time gig. And then the other kids. And I don’t know. I mean, I may not do anything. I may just focus on myself. I have a nine-year-old granddaughter. So, she’ll be, by the time I finish, she’ll be close to high school. So, that’s something I’ll be figuring out what the heck she’s doing. But I don’t know. I’m not looking past that. I’ll be doing things and going places. I know that’s gonna happen, but I haven’t made any plans other than that.

Published on Oct 11, 2025