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"I say to myself, 'Stay relaxed.' It's a funny feeling because the only thing I really recognize when I'm on a jump is when I touch the board and when I land. In the air it goes so fast I really don't feel it. It's like boom, click, click, land. I don't feel the movements of the jump. I don't feel the action involved. Sometimes I even have to ask Coach Tellez, 'Did I do it good?' " Landing, he should swing his arms forward and back, extending his left leg and then his right straight before him. Usually the arms remain out in front, but if he could bring them behind on the splashdown, it might extend the jump 3 in. He is only 4ΒΌ in. behind Beamon.
The Lewis streak of long-jump victories stands at 36, but he is not unanimously cheered. Last year at Indianapolis, not waiting until he crossed the finish line to celebrate the first triple victory (the 100,200 and long jump) at a national outdoors championship in this century, Lewis held up his arms and began to catch complaints. He is something of a showboat. "A little humility is in order," soft-spoken Hurdler Edwin Moses, undefeated in 102 races, has observed. Criticism from inside the sport wounds Lewis, and the scrutiny of the press worries him. "People are trying to say that I'm two different personalities, that I wear two masks. Outside the house, friendly and happy. Inside, cold, calculating, even evil. Sometimes I find this world baffling." His remedies for worldly tensions have included silent meditation sessions with Guru Sri Chinmoy and, more devoutly, a budding ministry with an athletic evangelical association called the Lay Witnesses for Christ. "It helped me to realize that I have a God-given talent." As for that day in Indianapolis when he may have tossed away a 200-meter world record by raising his arms, he says, "That was my way of showing the joy of what I do. When I compete, it's like I'm six years old. I'm in my own realm."
It is a high-rent district. He resides in an elegant Victorian house in Houston with his dog Sasha, a Samoyed. Signing off on his telephone-answering machine, he says, "And Sasha thanks you." A collector of silver and French crystal, he developed an appreciation for fine things on browsing trips with his mother during days off on the European track tour. He drives a white BMW equipped with a phone that makes no reference to Sasha. Although he rotates his omnipresent sunglasses by the frame color, and favors the gaudiest of the skintight warmup suits proliferating at track meets now, he is less colorful and more subdued than he looks. "He is not really part of the crowd," his father says. Carl says, "I let in what I want to let in."