Leap to Glory Just when it seemed his wondrous story had ended, Carl Lewis added a thrilling final chapter by Rick Reilly It wasn't supposed to happen. It couldn't have happened. But the man who made the U.S. Olympic team by a mere inch, the man who made it to the finals only by grabbing onto the last handrail on the last caboose, the oldest man in the field, won the gold with ancient legs, gray hair and a heart that stays forever young. Lewis's third jump, which went 27'10 3/4", produced the ninth gold of his glittering Olympic career. photograph by Walter Iooss Jr. Carl Lewis beat age, gravity, history, logic and the world on Monday night at a rocking Olympic Stadium in Atlanta to win the gold medal in the long jump, becoming the only track and field athlete besides discus thrower Al Oerter to win four gold medals in a single event. It was his fourth and last Olympics, his ninth gold, his 10th medal and quite possibly his most impossible moment in an impossibly brilliant career. And it all began so ordinarily. Lewis sat in third place behind Emmanuel Bangue of France and Mike Powell. Lewis had looked very mortal in his first two jumps, but something happened to him on his third, something you could see in his eyes. He veered right on his approach, but thumped the board and took off like he meant it. Lord, he stayed up forever. Looking down at it from the heavens, it must have been some sight, Lewis hanging up there like some David Copperfield trick, bathed in camera flashes, tens of thousands of them, so that Olympic Stadium looked like a bowl of stars, and the brightest was Lewis. And now gravity remembered and he started to descend, stretching all those old bones and muscles and memories toward history. And as he came down, he actually looked down and to the right, to the huge meter markers set there for the crowd, to see how far he might go. And when he hit, he did not fall back, but sprang forward and then out of his favorite sandbox in all the world. When he saw his heel marks, saw how far he had gone, he collapsed to his knees and fell flat forward, as though he had taken a javelin in the back. When the scoreboard finally came up seconds later and read 27'10 3/4"—his best jump at sea level in four years, since the Barcelona Olympics—Lewis looked stunned, and as he clutched his graying head, the crow's feet around his eyes stretched seamless, and those old legs bounced him around like a schoolboy. The favorite and world-record holder, Powell, lurked in fourth place with two tries left. But on his fifth jump Powell fouled and, worse, strained his groin. Atlanta was his last chance to beat Lewis in an Olympics—he never had—and Powell could feel it slipping away. He had spent a lifetime sitting on track benches, waiting for Lewis to drop more hurt on him. He had lost to Lewis in Europe and Asia, lost to him from ahead and behind; he had lost to him for eight straight years at one point, and now it was happening again. When Powell tried to jog, to try a sixth jump, the pain was even worse, and he sat back down, weeping. Yet he tried again, against all sense. As Powell sprinted down the runway, he grimaced, and as he leaped and rose, it seemed as if he tripped in midair, and he landed face first and writhed forward in pain. He lay there for minutes until finally rising, his dark body and face covered in sand and tears and regret. "It's over," Powell said later in the dark reaches of the stadium, as Lewis took still another victory lap at his expense. "I can't believe it. I didn't win. I didn't get a chance to medal." Lewis needed to witness only two more jumps to wrap up his preposterous achievement. The first was made by Bangue. But Bangue was a dud. And then came the other American, Jumping Joe Greene, who smiled at the situation, got the crowd clapping and then fouled. Lewis first hugged Greene, who won the bronze (James Beckford of Jamaica was second), and then took his lap, holding not one American flag but two. He hugged Jesse Jackson on the way, and his sister, Carol, and then passed a huge banner that read, "Thank You, Carl Lewis." You try to give the man a gold watch, and he steals your gold medal instead. You ask him to pass the torch, and he sets your Olympics on fire instead. "You've just seen a great performer at the end of his career," said Lewis's coach, Tom Tellez. "People thought he couldn't do it, but he did. He's the greatest athlete I've ever seen." After an injured Powell fell face-down in the long jump pit, Lewis again stood tall on the medal stand. photograph by Walter Iooss Jr. What's funny is that all last week there was a guy bopping around Atlanta saying he was Carl Lewis, but he sure didn't seem like Carl Lewis. The real Carl Lewis doesn't have gray hair popping up like white coals in a charcoal bed. This one said he was 35. Carl Lewis isn't 35. He will always be 22, scorching lane 4, his opponents dragged along in his shoesuck. This Carl Lewis wasn't even entered in an Olympic sprint. Not the 100, not the 200, not the relay: At the U.S. trials he missed qualifying for any of the sprints by a Georgia mile, actually finishing dead last in the 100. He grunted and moaned for a while about not being the anchor in the 4 x 100, saying he had been promised the spot by U.S. track and field coach Erv Hunt ("I'm still the best 100 anchor in the world," Lewis said last week), but people just sort of turned away and rolled their eyes as if Lewis were Uncle Milt at Thanksgiving, challenging everybody to wrestle. One day in Atlanta a man and his child went up to Lewis, and the man said, "Mr. Lewis, my father took me to see you in Los Angeles!" That was a crusher. And when Lewis was around the U.S. women gymnasts last week, he said he felt slightly older than carbon. No wonder. When Lewis made his first Olympic team, in 1980, Dominique Moceanu hadn't been born. In Atlanta, Lewis was less an athlete than a sort of complicated memorial. He was selected to represent the athletes of 1984 during the opening ceremonies and later was honored as one of 100 golden Olympians at a banquet celebrating the Games' centennial. One member of the U.S. team, marathoner Jenny Spangler, probably wouldn't have made it to the '96 Games had she not been among the several athletes Lewis personally sponsored at the trials. Here he was, wanting to be feared but getting bronzed instead. This Carl Lewis had so little to do. Only one event for the man who used to buzz from 100 heat to long jump final to 200 semifinal in a single day? This Lewis was wandering around with time on his hands. It was like seeing Martha Stewart with her feet up, tossing cards into a hat. What Lewis had become in this, his final Olympics, was just another athlete thrilled to have made the team and praying to win a medal. "I'll be just like 99 percent of all the other athletes," he wrote in his America Online column before the Games, "and it's the first time in my adult life that I can actually say that." He had qualified for the long jump by an inch, and it was an upset that he had made it at all. It would be even more of a shock if he won a medal. His longest jump this year—27'2 3/4", at the trials—was more than two feet short of Mike Powell's world-record 29'4 1/2". Still, none of this bothered him. In fact he seemed to love the challenge. "I'm not afraid to lose," he said—and the admission made him smile. For the first time in his Olympic career Lewis could finger paint his way through the Games instead of having to reproduce the Sistine Chapel. This Lewis was less scripted, more spontaneous. He has always seen life as a drama and himself as the third act, but in Atlanta, Lewis was emotional right from the start. He set an American Olympic record for Kleenex. When U.S. gymnast Dominique Dawes stumbled and fell out of medal contention in the all-around competition last Thursday, Lewis stood in the stands and cried. When a swimmer, not even an American, broke down and cried one day over making the finals, Lewis sat in the stands and cried too. He would think of his father, who was buried in 1987 with Carl's first gold medal in his hands, and tear up. "I don't know," Lewis said in a quiet moment. "You get older, you start appreciating things more." Even Olympics. But a song from the old days kept playing on his mind's jukebox. He had this epiphany during a workout in Houston before he flew to Atlanta. His jumps were perfect. His sprints were perfect. His muscles felt fine, his spirits finer. The allergies were gone, as were the cramps that had bugged him during this year's trials. He was climbing out of the long jump pit when it hit him. "All of a sudden I had this eerie feeling that I was winning the gold medal," he said. "Right then. And that's when I said to myself, You know, you could win this." He started thinking about one more victory lap. Start in L.A. and end in Atlanta. Lewis got his game plan ready. "I want to get 'em with the first jump," he said. "I've won Olympics with my first jump. I just want to jump 28 feet and see what happens." The way Lewis was jumping in the qualifying, it looked as if he would have to see what happened from the stands. Twelve would go on to the finals, but on his first try Lewis jumped like a man in marble shoes, going a measly 26' 1/4" to rank 11th. On the second try he aborted at takeoff, leaving him very uh-oh 15th. And that's where things stood as Lewis readied for his third and last try, wiggling nervously and looking down that long runway into the rest of his life. "No way I wanted that to be my last experience in the Olympics," Lewis said. Faced with do or die, he did, flying not only into the top 12, but into the top one, hang-gliding 27' 2 1/2". It was the longest jump of the night and the most thrilling qualifying Olympic leap since Jesse Owens took a tip from Luz Long. As Lewis left the track that exhausting night, a red-eyed Jeffrey Marx, Lewis's biographer, reached out across a barricade, arm-tackled him to his chest and said, "You're going to win this thing." Lewis looked at him as if he were telling him the sky is up. "Oh, I know I am," he said. "Absolutely." So one last time, in his neat-as-a-pin hotel room at the Sheraton in Atlanta, he laid out his Olympic uniform as he always has—the singlet over the back of the chair, the shorts on the seat, the socks over the shorts and the long jump shoes in front, a dream just waiting to be filled. By 10 p.m. on Monday, July 29, 1996, Lewis had realized one of his wildest dreams yet. "How the hell did you all get in my dream?" he asked as he sat down at his press conference. And when they called him forward to his last Olympic victory stand in that sweet Georgia night, he covered his face with his hands again and again, as if even he couldn't believe this. And before they played the first note, he was crying again. Boy, some guys just can't stand happy endings.