Lessons from childhood hero Carl Lewis

Back in August 1987, I was convinced that I could run 100 metres in around eleven seconds. With a bit of training, I would get this to 10 seconds or thereabouts, and then dip under it.

I was nine years old, and clearly delusional, but my delusion was one shared by many boys that year.

The reason was that we were in the middle of one of the greatest sprint duels in sporting history — that between Canadian Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis of the US.

Many a sprint was staged between boys on the streets of Kisumu, and we all emulated one or the other superstar —I was a Ben Johnson guy back then.

The duel ended with Johnson’s disqualification after the 1988 Olympic final in Seoul when he was found to have been a drug cheat, but it didn’t end what was a golden era in athletics.

I met Carl Lewis last Thursday in Nairobi, and if you take away the grey hair, he still looks as chiselled and as sleek as he was twenty five years ago, and he would smash me in a sprint with his eyes closed.

He was here for an IBM event and Kui Kinyanjui asked whether I would like to interview him. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance of meeting and speaking to a legend?

Lewis is now doing corporate work for companies such as IBM as well as serving as a UN goodwill ambassador. He seems excited about technology and its ability to transform life, sports and Africa but is wary of social media and told me how critical he is of people who are constantly living their lives and updating them on these media.

“People become a caricature,” he says. “If it was thirty years ago and I had Twitter, I would be tweeting the same amount that I’m tweeting now. I would not have been saying ‘It’s half time now, and I feel great’. Who cares?”

Social media is for him (and any company or public figure) a means to cut through the clutter and bypass intermediaries such as the mainstream media. Such an outspoken figure as he was — and still is — would have benefited from that kind of tool back then.

But it is his exploits from a quarter-century ago that animate him more, and where other important business insights are to be found.

Back in that era, there was the abbreviated Lewis-Johnson clash. But Carl Lewis was also the world’s pre-eminent long jumper and had not been beaten in any competition between 1981 and 1991.

The 1991 contest in Tokyo at the World Championships was one that still sends thrills down the spine of anyone who was there or watched on television.

The world record at the time — 8.9 metres — had stood since it was set at altitude in Mexico City in 1968. It looked impregnable, but Lewis’s generation looked like it would threaten that record.

On that night in Tokyo, Lewis did break it — by one centimetre — only to see his effort blitzed by Mike Powell, who jumped to a world-record with 8.95m.
That record has never been beaten, and no one has ever come close. Powell, as well, disappeared into the history books.

Speak to Lewis about this twenty-three years later and his eyes still blaze. In business, as in sports, you can be the undisputed leader of your industry for decades and be as innovative as you think possible. But in one moment of serendipity, an upstart can come out of nowhere and upend your entire business.

Ask Nokia, who was the unquestionable cock of the mobile phone walk until a computer manufacturer named Apple launched a phone without buttons.

And even as other manufacturers realised the danger in the iPhone, Canadian company Research in Motion assumed that no serious businessperson would let go of his Blackberry. Both companies are now in the abyss, looking up at Apple — which is in turn being eclipsed by Android-enabled phones.

“There was an era of magic,” Lewis told me referring to not just his career, but also that of Sergei Bubka (whose two-decade old world record in the pole vault was only broken two weeks ago), and Javier Sotomayor, whose high jump world record is still intact after twenty-one years.

Policy toolboxes

Lewis believes something has been lost in sports. Despite all the technology now available, the world’s best long jumpers on average are jumping to lengths he was regularly jumping at in 1979.

The same trajectory is evident in global economic matters. Globalisation was supposed to be inexorable, carried along by its own momentum. Now, however, autarky is starting to return to policymakers’ toolboxes.

Free trade is not always seen as prima facie positive and some are seeing dark echoes of the last time globalisation collapsed, with the world sinking into global conflict in 1914.

Too many dark thoughts, one might say. So let me go back to my delusions. Carl Lewis, let’s meet at the track at Nyayo Stadium. You’re 52. I’m 36. Bring it on.

Mr Kantai is the NTV Business Editor.