Was carl lewis gay

It doesn’t help that Lewis is incredibly private about his personal affairs. The rumors about his sexuality were started, Lewis says, by a spurned lover "who had been in bed with me more than enough times to know that I was not gay." Inside Track's few surprises. With his final efforts of 8.

There was no driving societal impetus here — no broken family or desire to get out of the projects. Share with a friend:. Be a man! In the high-stakes arena of professional sport, Lewis was hardly the first male athlete to have let his emotions show. Lewis was a dominant sprinter and long jumper whose career spanned from to , when he last won the Olympic long jump.

Almost unbelievably, in the fifth round, Powell went one better, soaring to a wind legal 8. Since he exploded onto the international stage as a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old in , becoming the number one ranked meter sprinter and long jumper in the world, Lewis had been a source of fascination and mystery for the American mainstream media.

Frederick Carlton Lewis (born July 1, ) is an American former track and field athlete who won nine Olympic gold medals, one Olympic silver medal, and 10 World Championships medals, including eight gold. Lewis responded with 8. By the beginning of , personal tragedies and athletic setbacks had seen some journalists soften towards Lewis.

Her is the author of 'Lerone Bennett, Jr. Follow him on Twitter ejwestuk. The way Lewis dressed always caused questions to surface about his preferences, even though he was married. Let’s address the talks below. VOTE: What is Carl Lewis’s Sexuality? Some of his peers even thought he was a secret homosexual.

He wiped the tears from his eyes — tears of disbelief, tears of disappointment — when, from nowhere, Mike Powell stole the long jump record that was supposed to be his. Powell was also in good form, having won thirteen of the fourteen long jump competitions he had entered that year — although the man he had lost to at the American championships was the man that many commentators had already crowned world champion.

In the long jump, Lewis arrived in Tokyo unbeaten in sixty-five competitions, a remarkable streak stretching back to the early s. However, with his second jump, Powell reached 8. His mark was measured at 8. A few weeks ago marked the 30 th anniversary of perhaps the greatest track and field duel of all time.

0. Even up to this day, people still ask the question: is Carl Lewis gay? His choir-boy reputation had also begun to tarnish; not least because of an arrest for drunk driving in his adopted hometown of Houston, Texas. Lewis called Britain’s Daley Thompson (pictured) 'childish' after he wore a T-shirt to a press conference that said: ‘Is the world’s second-greatest athlete gay?’.

A six-time Olympic gold medalist he would eventually win a total of nine , Lewis had already established his standing as one of the greatest athletes of all time. The time Olympic medal winner, 63, reveals in I’m Carl Lewis that he’s never been in a long-term relationship because he feared it would affect his professional aspirations.

Lewis was the prohibitive favorite for the title. With his first leap, Lewis provided a reminder of his athletic dominance. From the alleged use of stimulants to rumors about his sexuality, the athlete’s life has been stripped and investigated. He was less than a week removed from winning his third world title in the meters, with his time of 9.

As Donald McCrae and other writers attest, within the overwhelmingly white world of s sports journalism, there was often little space for Black athletes who did not conform to existing, and often highly problematic, conceptions of racial identity. He showed little interest in basketball, and reportedly preferred to pick daisies than play ball in the outfield.

Olympic sprinter Carl Lewis was deemed the greatest athlete of all time at his peak in the s, but that came crashing down when gay rumors began to swirl around him. Muhammad Ali was just one earlier Black sporting superstar who had been described in such terms — in relation to both his dazzling good looks and craft in the boxing ring.

In an era where media understandings of race, masculinity, and sporting excellence continued to be shaped by expectations of social pathology and embodied by imposing figures such as Lawrence Taylor, Bo Jackson, and Mike Tyson, Lewis disrupted these assumptions.