Don’t Expect Carl Lewis to Match ’84 by Winning Four Gold Medals

Matching Jesse Owens once may be enough for Carl Lewis, who’s not as smitten with pursuing four gold medals as he was four years ago.

With the Seoul Olympics in sight, Lewis says he is focusing more on the 100 meters and the long jump and less on the 200 meters and the 400-meter relay.

Lewis won a gold medal in each of those events in the Los Angeles Olympics, matching Owens’ feat of 1936.

But that was 1984, and the circumstances are different now, the 26-year-old Lewis says.

“I do have the feeling and I do have the desire (to try for four golds), but right now the scheduling is really bad for that,” Lewis said.

“Like I said, I’m getting down to the end of my career--not the end, but we’re talking about being close--and probably my last Olympics. I would like to really be the best I could be.

“It’s so difficult running the relay, because they want you to run a million races. If that’s what they want to do, that’s fine. But I’d like to really focus on the other events a lot this year.”

The 200 meters is one of them, but it will probably be out because Lewis says the second round of qualifying in the Olympics will be too close to the long jump competition.

And he is just not enthused about the relay team, even though he anchored it during world-record performances at the 1983 World Championships and again at the 1984 Olympics.

“I’ve been historically on the relay; I’ve been on the fastest team to ever run,” Lewis said. “But it really gets difficult, because it always becomes a power struggle if you have to go to this meet and you have to go to that meet. Being a person who does multiple events, I really need to focus on training more, instead of going to different meets.

“So instead of getting in so many different power struggles, I think this year I may just relinquish my spot if I were to make the team. I haven’t made that decision final yet, but that’s just a thought at this point.”

Despite finishing a disappointing fifth in 10.29 seconds at the Mt. San Antonio College Relays last weekend, Lewis says he feels better than he did prior to the ’84 Games.

And he says he’s drawing motivation from his showdown with Canadian Ben Johnson in the 100 meters at last summer’s World Championships in Rome.

Johnson lowered the world record by .10 of a second to 9.83, and Lewis was second in a personal-best 9.93.

At first, Lewis said, he thought he had run a technically poor race, somewhere around 10.08 or 10.09 seconds.

“Then when I saw the time, the emotion changed. I felt, hey, wait a minute. I must have run a low 9.9 or maybe a high 9.8. Running that type of race, running that fast, it was stimulating to me. And that’s the way I look at it. I can run a lot faster; I can do a lot of things better.

“Going into Rome, that was my first 100 meters since the TAC meet, so I really wasn’t as prepared as I should have been. But I really competed, I mean that was the thing about it. ... I went out there with the intention of winning and I went above the level I thought I could have at that point.

“So I think that putting that with being more prepared, I can run faster. And that’s why I’m excited, because I can run faster, not ‘Hey, let’s go beat Ben,’ but ‘Hey, I can run 9.8.’ I believe that.

“He ran probably the race of his life and ran 9.83 and I feel I can run that, and it won’t be the race of my life. I feel I can run a great race and run that fast. So that’s exciting. That means a lot.”