When it comes to winning gold, it doesn’t hurt to look good while you do it, according to a 10-time Olympic medal, Carl Lewis.
Lewis, 63, won his first four gold medals during the 1984 Olympic debut in Los Angeles before changing his uniform. On the eve of his next 1988 Olympic ride, Lewis came out on the track, wearing a yellow and blue dagger at the US Outdoors Championships, becoming the first runner to be a sports stream in the competition.
Almost 30 years after his last Olympics in 1996, Lewis tells people that he made that controversial choice then because “sex is being sold”.
“Why did I wear bodysuit? Because our bodies looked good,” he continues. “We were covered, and I’m like,” Yes, my body, bodies, tracking bodies look amazing. “So why don’t we show our bodies?”
Carl Lewis runs a package at the 1988 Summer Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea.
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“And now it’s normal,” Lewis adds, even jokes that people show their bodies “too much” today, compared to the 80’s when, Lewis says, the reaction to his exhaustive clothes was “what the hell?”
Lewis addresses bodysuity in I am Carl LewisA new documentary that covers his border career that premiered at the SXSW and shown at the March Festival. He says in the movie that people were shocked and called him “Androgyno” and “Vili”, but he believed in clothing as “an attempt to create a brand” after his Olympic decay.
“I was like,” Whatever, who cares? “” Lewis says u I am Carl Lewis. “No one did what I did for the fun value of the sport.”
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In the 80s and 90s, Lewis twice helped now win gold in men’s 4x100m and collected nine Olympic gold medals and one silver, making it one of only four athletes who did so. Despite their athletic skill, Lewis has often criticized the media for their behavior, style and insistence on the compensation of amateur athletes.
“There were certain norms of amateur athletes you had to have,” Lewis explains. “You are not allowed to be fashionable, period. If you are fashion, something is wrong. You are not allowed to talk about questions that affect you. You just should have been happy.”
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Carl Lewis at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
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Lewis says he wanted to be more than that and that he considered himself a “song of entertainers”, which is why he was involved in music and brought elements of performance on the track.
“Every race, when I finished, my hands were in the air, as I was on stage,” Lewis says with a laugh. “I didn’t realize I’m so creepy dramatic.”
Already decorated Olympian in 1994, Lewis re -made titles when he agreed to wear red heels as he posed in the attitude of a runner for the Pirelli ad, photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
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“The return was just huge,” Lewis says, adding that “the hypermasculinity of the blacks” played a role in negative reactions.
The photo has further encouraged the rumors of his sexuality, which, Lewis says in the movie, “I’m just constantly my whole career.”
“He got off the track. We can’t beat you. We can’t stop you, so now we’ll start the Whisper campaign to scare you,” Lewis continues. “I was very young in those days, so it’s all very painful.”
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Source: HIS Education