When it comes to winning gold, it doesn’t hurt to look good while you do it, according to 10-time Olympic medalist Carl Lewis.
Lewis, 63, won his first four gold medals during his 1984 Olympic debut in Los Angeles before changing his uniform. Ahead of his next Olympic run in 1988, Lewis took to the track wearing a yellow and blue bodysuit at the 1985 USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships, becoming the first runner to sport a bodysuit in competition.
Almost 30 years after his final Olympics in 1996, Lewis tells PEOPLE he made that then-controversial choice because “sex sells.”
“Why did I wear a bodysuit? Because our bodies looked good,” he continues. “We were covered, and I’m like, ‘Yeah my body, our bodies, track bodies look amazing.’ So why are we not showing our bodies?”
Carl Lewis leads the pack at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea.
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“And now it’s normal,” Lewis adds, even joking that people today show their bodies “too much,” compared to the ‘80s when, Lewis says, the reaction to his skin-tight outfit was “What the hell?”
Lewis addresses the bodysuit in I’m Carl Lewis, the new documentary covering his boundary-pushing career that premiered at SXSW and screened at the festival in March. He says in the film that people were shocked and called him “androgynous” and a “fairy,” but he believed in the outfit as “an attempt to create a brand,” following his Olympic breakout.
“I was like, ‘Whatever, who cares?’ ” Lewis says in I’m Carl Lewis. “No one did what I did for the entertainment value of sports.”
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Lewis twice helped the U.S. win gold in the men’s 4x100m and collected nine Olympic gold medals and one silver, making him one of only four athletes to do so. Despite his athletic prowess, Lewis was often criticized by the media for his demeanor, style and insistence on compensating amateur athletes.
“There were certain norms of an amateur athlete that you had to have,” Lewis explains. “You are not allowed to be fashionable, period. If you’re fashionable, something’s wrong. You’re not allowed to speak about issues that affect you. You’re just supposed to be happy.”
Carl Lewis at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
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Lewis says he wanted to be more than that and thought of himself as “an entertainer running track,” which is why he dabbled in music and brought performance elements onto the track.
“Every race, when I finished, my hands were in the air, like I was on stage,” Lewis says with a laugh. “I didn’t realize I was so freaking dramatic.”
Already a decorated Olympian in 1994, Lewis made headlines again when he agreed to wear red stilettos while posing in a runner’s stance for a Pirelli ad that was photographed by Annie Leibovitz.
“The pushback was just huge,” Lewis says, adding that “the hypermasculinity of a Black man” played a role in the negative reactions.
The photo further fueled rumors about his sexuality, which, Lewis says in the film, “have been just nonstop my whole career.”
“It came 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 those days, so all of that’s very hurtful.”
