What he does is so simple, and how he does it so complicated, that Carl Lewis is a basic mystery. How fast he runs, how far he jumps, may serve to establish the precise lengths to which men can go. Gentler than a superman, more delicate than the common perception of a strong man, Lewis is physically the most advanced human being in the world, and about to become the most famous global sports figure since Muhammad Ali.
At the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, 48 years after Jesse Owens won gold medals in the long jump, the 100, the 200 and the relay, Lewis is favored in the same four events. Amid the bedlam of track's athletic circus, only he makes everything else come to a stop. His body is hard, like mahogany, but carved in unusually clear detail, including ropelike muscular definition. He is full-faced, rather babyfaced, but otherwise trim: 6 ft. 2 in., 173 Ibs. As a 100-meter sprinter, Lewis has registered the third-fastest time ever, 9.97 sec. In the 200 he is the second-fastest man in history and gaining. He holds the long-jump record indoors. Among the ten best jumps outdoors, nine are his. And he is far from finished. "There are going to be some absolutely unheard of things coming from me," he says.
Lewis talks of his running in much the same manner as baseball's Reggie Jackson, who refers to himself in the third person proper. "When I run like Carl Lewis," Lewis says, "relaxed, smooth, easy, I can run races that seem effortless to me and to those watching." But he would have them know it is not effortless. "Everyone thinks it just happened one day, that the earth opened up and out came Carl Lewis. Everyone acts like I just stepped on the track and I was No. 1."
His life may be found too ordinary for his glory: born 23 years ago in Birmingham, he was raised in Willingboro, N.J., and trained in Houston. Where Lewis is a standard of physical strength, Jesse Owens was a symbol of human struggle, against not only poverty and bigotry but tyranny as well. Owens' father was a sharecropper, his grandfather a slave. Carl's father and mother coach track. "Jesse was the greatest thing to me other than life's breath," says Bill Lewis, a fit and handsome man in a cowboy hat, who prizes a photograph of Owens posing with ten-year-old Carl and a cousin. Visiting a small meet, Owens told young Lewis to have fun, advice Carl has use for now.